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

201–210 of 344 posts

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

#201

Post by selimthegrim »

logicallee wrote: post #163
selimthegrim wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Less window is informal but I don’t see how it’s incorrect. Bread is both correct and fits the context better.

Yes but from "times" you can see that this is a test of VERY basic English. I agree with you that Bread is both correct and fits the context better, and I would still choose "eggs" (a worse answer, from the choices given) because I would analyze what the (really stupid) question-writer wanted. You are right that window exists in that sense but in this case it's clear that the question writers didn't think about it. F…

No, I meant less physical window, although I see what you are getting at with the other sense.

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

#202

Post by pzh »

andrew_ wrote: post #10

Tossing my hat in the ring with a similar experience. Was approached in 2003 because of an app I had written that got attention, and was told that Googlers wanted to speak with me about the app. What followed was three calls with gate-keepers of sorts, between which there was zero knowledge transfer from call to call. None of them inquired about the app and all of them asked questions so unrelated to the app that the…

This sounds like “Our engineering director was very impressed with your experience, and we would like to set up a 15 min call to find out what you actually do.” Pretty much a recruiter tactic.

They discover some random nugget of info about you and then they use it as a lead to cold email you. If you respond, they apply for an entry level position on your behalf.

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

#203

Post by thereare5lights »

sdhgaiojfsa wrote: post #125
waisbrot wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> He's probably being interviewed for an SRE team lead or thereabouts OK, but incorrect/inflexible quizzing about tech questions is inappropriate full stop. If this was an interview for SWE summer intern it'd be a badly-run interview. > exactly what this process is supposed to do You can't ensure that there will be no hurt feelings ever, but ideally the candidates you fail don't go around talking about how poor your…

> OK, but incorrect/inflexible quizzing about tech questions is inappropriate full stop. If this was an interview for SWE summer intern it'd be a badly-run interview. I would not ask the questions listed in this interview. But, I'm not a recruiter. I think it's safe to say that the average recruiter has a better understanding of their objectives and constraints than I do, and is better able to judge what types of que…

> I think it's safe to say that the average recruiter has a better understanding of their objectives and constraints than I do, and is better able to judge what types of questions to ask during an initial screen than I am.

That's an odd assumption to make, that the average recruiter is competent, for a community that assumes the vast majority of their fellow engineers can't code.

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

#204

Post by magic_beans »

vaxin wrote: post #168
geofft wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An annoying interview process is a one-time pain, though. Once you're in it's behind you. (For my current employer - not Google - I did a 3-hour auto-graded coding test in which I resorted to rewriting something in C and not calling free() to make it fast enough to pass all the test cases, which I hated , but it was a one-time thing and the company itself is otherwise pretty reasonable. I should probably have held it…

You forgot one more thing, google is loosing enginers due to it creepy nature. I was invited to interviews on multiple occasions but they are one of the last companies I would work for. I don't care about money, wherever I was working, I had it more than enough to have a really good life and a thousand $ up or down doesnt make much of a difference. But working for a company that actually engages into global spying of…

"google is loosing enginers due to it creepy nature"

Have a source for that?

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

#205

Post by adrianmonk »

andrew_ wrote: post #10

Tossing my hat in the ring with a similar experience. Was approached in 2003 because of an app I had written that got attention, and was told that Googlers wanted to speak with me about the app. What followed was three calls with gate-keepers of sorts, between which there was zero knowledge transfer from call to call. None of them inquired about the app and all of them asked questions so unrelated to the app that the…

> three calls with gate-keepers of sorts, between which there was zero knowledge transfer from call to call

That may have been disorganization, but there's also a decent justification for intentionally limiting knowledge transfer. You get 3 independent opinions that are not biased by the others.

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

#206

Post by jiveturkey »

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…

Ha! I remember this from back then. Interview process aside, did you see the guy's technology page?

Which process has led to TrustLeap's technology? Instead of trying to add something on the top of a multi-layered construction done by many different persons in a period of time exceeding 30 years, TWD has resolved the problem from scratch in a few months.

riiiiight

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

#207

Post by mempko »

GlennS wrote: post #175
psyc wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt it's sarcasm. I've often lamented that as a 30-year 'veteran' I'm still often treated as though I'm probably incompetent, until proven otherwise beyond a reasonable doubt. Some people do ignore my CV. I know that some people believe this is right and necessary because you can't trust anyone. I believe it's a travesty in this industry, and if I am treated this way, I'm walking straight out the door and into my…

How do you interview someone more experienced than yourself? In the last set of interviews I had to do, I've ended up doing the role of talking to people about the technologies listed on their CV and asking them detailed questions to find out just how well they really know them. This just because I happened to be the person in our company who knew a little bit about most of the things that the people we were intervie…

The alternative is for our field to have a strong organization that vets it's members, like any other professional field such as lawyers and other engineering disciplines. That way, before you even meet the person, you can assume a level of competence and can get into much deeper questions faster.

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

#208

Post by tzs »

poxrud wrote: post #197
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 ar…

Assuming that they want the number of 1 bits (the question asked for the number of bits, not the number of 1 bits--hence my answer), it is not obvious to me that a lookup table is the fastest.

Given an unsigned 32-bit value, v, this well-known bit hack [1] counts the number of 1 bits:

  v = v - ((v >> 1) & 0x55555555);
  v = (v & 0x33333333) + ((v >> 2) & 0x33333333);
  count = ((v + (v >> 4) & 0x0F0F0F0F) * 0x01010101) >> 24;
If you can treat the 10000 16-bit values as 5000 32-bit values, applying the above 5000 times might be as fast or faster than applying the table lookup method to 20000 bytes. It will depend on precise details of the particular computer on which it is run.

[1] http://graphics.stanford.edu/~seander/bithacks.html

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

#209

Post by SilasX »

rayiner wrote: post #170
golergka wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've often lamented that as a 30-year 'veteran' I'm still often treated as though I'm probably incompetent, until proven otherwise beyond a reasonable doubt. I have had a pleasure of interviewing a 'veteran' who listed both Emacs and vim on his resume, among dozens of other keywords and many, many years of professional experience. I asked him, how do you exit these text editors? "As any other program", he answered,…

Is that answer wrong? Does using GVIM or Aquamacs mean you don’t know vim and emacs?

The whole point of vim and emacs is that you can do everything from the keyboard and not have to switch your hands to/from it. Fancier versions (like Macvim, which I use) support the same basic premise.

Now, certainly, with the fancier GUIs you can absolutely use mouse inputs. But it's quite a bizarre scenario where someone would be using an interface narrowly optimized to use the keyboard for everything, and yet still consistently use the mouse to exit "like every other application". The reason you use emacs/vim is to keep your hands from having to leave the keyboard! Why would you do that and yet not use the standard command for quitting? Not even ctrl/cmd-Q?

The parent is right to be suspicious of someone claiming extensive emacs/vim experience while using the mouse as a default option for a frequent, required command.

FWIW: I'm a Macvim user that has never quit it by clicking an X even though I know it's possible (at least for the individual windows). Although also FWIW I don't use the vim window feature and would fail questions about that.

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

#210

Post by skj »

waisbrot wrote: post #116
dmoy wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They mean false negative from a statistics point of view, which is what this literally is (if we take the author's assumption that they're qualified at face value). A false negative is an error in the process.

madamelic is saying that the described interview process would select against qualified candidates because some of the items on the answer sheet are flat-out wrong. Analogy would be if we were evaluating a blood-pressure drug, but our BP-measurement cuff was miss-calibrated and all readings were -10 from reality.

And all examples in question would be labeled "false negative"s.
Post reply on HN