Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google's “Director of Engineering” Hiring Test (2016)

gwan.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 344 posts

Re: Google's “Director of Engineering” Hiring Test (2016)

#191

Post by kens »

dvt wrote: post #139
joshuamorton wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not what was said. At all. To be perfectly honest, I doubt there are dozens of director-level interview samples because there aren't tons of engineering directors, further "director of engineering" is a management, not technical role, so wouldn't be given questions like this, at all, and of the remainder, most of them were promoted from within google, not hired from outside it. Most new hires get screened in s…

> What these questions are are the standard set of pre-screening questions asked of a potential SRE IC or maybe TLM candidate. A SWE wouldn't be asked these questions, because they aren't related to the role. A SWE candidate still might get screened, but not with these questions. A question on Glassdoor (for a Director position) is in the same vein: "How do you tell if a calculator is 8 bit or 16 bit."[1] [1] https:/…

> How do you tell if a calculator is 8 bit or 16 bit.

As someone who has reverse-engineered calculators, that question has me curious. You could implement the same external behavior regardless of what processor a calculator uses. So I can't see any way to determine the bit width. Is there an answer I'm missing? (Also the question ignores the many 4-bit calculators.)

(Of course you could open up the chip and take a look with a microscope, which I've done. But I don't think that's the answer they are looking for.)

Re: Google's “Director of Engineering” Hiring Test (2016)

#192

Post by s17n »

dasil003 wrote: post #103
s17n wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I make it a point to not read resumes unless I'm supposed to be asking questions about their contents, to avoid bias.

So in the realm of infinite knowledge and experience candidates may have, the signal you want is based purely on the specific contrived questions of your choice. You should be aware this is not unbiased, it's just biased towards those who happen to have worked on similar problems to what you think is important. Google can probably get away with this due to the size of applicant pool, but when I see other companies ca…

It's hiring committee's job to read the resume, not the interviewer's.

Re: Google's “Director of Engineering” Hiring Test (2016)

#193

Post by nyanotech »

trisimix wrote: post #160
geofft wrote: post #43

This was posted previously, in October 2016: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12701272 An actual Google director of engineering pointed out that these are individual-contributor SWE/SRE questions (and I can attest I got very similar questions as a new college grad). As I commented previously: "Reading more closely, it sounds like they are not interviewing him for a director of engineering position; it just sounds…

Assuming he didnt lie about the exchange of words, this guy could be a homeless person make believing hes getting hired as ceo of google and this interview would still be an affront to proper advancement. You cannot possibly justify making a quiz that asks about kill in unix and doesnt accept SIGKILL ~literally kill with SIGTERM the default. If you are looking for the default level (15) you should specify. If this in…

I had a phone screen recently, and got asked some of the questions on this post. However, rather than that sigterm question, I got "What signal does the linux kill command emit by default?", (with the answer obviously being sigterm (I totally blanked out and got it wrong though :P)).

Anyway, I strongly suspect they're just misremembering that question.

Re: Google's “Director of Engineering” Hiring Test (2016)

#194

Post by s17n »

dvt wrote: post #54
s17n wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I make it a point to not read resumes unless I'm supposed to be asking questions about their contents, to avoid bias.

Uh, what? Every time I've done an interview, the first thing I looked at was the candidate's resume. Even ignoring the fact that everyone is different, has different experiences, and is strong/weak in different areas (which is very important to know as an interviewer), I'm not sure what kind of bias you're trying to avoid.

The recruiters tell you if they want you to ask questions about specific topics and realistically I'm only going to get to ask one question anyway. The main bias that I'm trying to avoid is knowing what school the candidate went to.

Re: Google's “Director of Engineering” Hiring Test (2016)

#195

Post by s17n »

zmarty wrote: post #181
s17n wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I make it a point to not read resumes unless I'm supposed to be asking questions about their contents, to avoid bias.

I think that approach is misguided. The resume has background information and my opinion is that interviews do not correctly capture the capabilities of a person.

Yeah but I'm not the person making the hiring decision, I'm just the interviewer. The way this works at companies like Google is that the interviewers submit feedback to the hiring committee and the hiring committee decides.

Re: Google's “Director of Engineering” Hiring Test (2016)

#196

Post by s17n »

crispyporkbites wrote: post #53
s17n wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I make it a point to not read resumes unless I'm supposed to be asking questions about their contents, to avoid bias.

Is this sarcasm? You just make your entire hiring call on talking to the person without looking at their career, academics and skills?

I'm not making a hiring decision, I'm just an interviewer.

Re: Google's “Director of Engineering” Hiring Test (2016)

#197

Post by poxrud »

tzs wrote: post #57

> There's an array of 10,000 16-bit values, how do you count the bits most efficiently? I would have said that I would multiply 10000 by 16. Oh well, no Google job for me I suppose.

I find that the solution to a lot of these trick interview questions is to use a hash table or some kind of a look up table. Even the famous google mock interview video uses a hash table in the solution.

The solution to this question is to use a 256bit lookup table. You'd need to precompute the lookup table that will give you the bit count of every possible bit combination in a byte. Then traverse your 10,000 long array, use your lookup table to count the bits and add them to your total.

Re: Google's “Director of Engineering” Hiring Test (2016)

#198

Post by SilasX »

wyldfire wrote: post #27

> Me: on which kind of CPU? Why not let me compare my code to yours in a benchmark? While I agree that this is the right answer, questions regarding "Big-O" are trying to find out whether or not you can evaluate the complexity of an algorithm. If you can, you have some hope of writing different useful benchmarks that could be compared, where sometimes you can see orders of magnitude of improvement. If you can't, you…

Well, I've been in this scenario before, and have resorted to that. I was this guy [1]. (Interview question in link, I had written a solution.)

The interviewer stubbornly insisted that the run time was n^2 because it had an inner loop. (Never mind that the inner wasn't looping over pairs with the bigger loop, but just the bits within that element.)

I went through a number of heuristics to convince him otherwise: what if you doubled the list, how would that analytically affect the run time? What if the elements were bigger? (as you can find from the reddit thread)

Disturbingly, I asked him what he would need to see to convince him that the code I wrote was O(n), and he said, "no inner loop", which reveals a profound misunderstanding of both the issue at hand, and how to resolve disagreement. At that point, I resorted to saying, well, let's run the code with increasing input size and see how it scales (which would give valuable information about its actual scaling behavior).

Then he refused, left the room, and told the director to veto me from the rest of that day's interviews.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6070001

Re: Google's “Director of Engineering” Hiring Test (2016)

#199

Post by stephencanon »

product50 wrote: post #147
Gargoyle wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Google is still not having any trouble attracting engineering talent." Is this really true, though? Are they losing out on more top end candidates? There are other places with interesting work and big paychecks. Some of them aren't building reputations for annoying interview processes.

An average IC5 eng at Google makes $350k all in. An IC6 eng goes to around $500k. You dont get those types of salaries elsewhere easily. This is especially important if you have a family in the bay area given the expenses.

> You dont get those types of salaries elsewhere easily.

Except for all of the other big tech companies?

Re: Google's “Director of Engineering” Hiring Test (2016)

#200

Post by product50 »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #183
product50 wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An average IC5 eng at Google makes $350k all in. An IC6 eng goes to around $500k. You dont get those types of salaries elsewhere easily. This is especially important if you have a family in the bay area given the expenses.

Liking money doesn't map to "best."

It doesn't. That said, in companies like Google, an eng has a lot of flexibility to choose the team they want to work on - so eventually many people find the thing which they really like. And good money on top of it is the icing on the cake.

Also, I linked money since the parent comment talked about finding interesting ans similar paying role as Google's.

Post reply on HN