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

Post by drdeadringer » Thu, Apr 26, 2018, 6:12 PM UTC

s17n wrote: post #192

dasil003 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Post by tex0 » Thu, Apr 26, 2018, 6:17 PM UTC

joshuamorton wrote: post #155

shubb wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's hard to square that with the whole 10x engineer thing. It is true that hiring a security risk could be more damaging than rejecting a super talent, but all companies have systems in place that should reduce impact of incompetence and manage out inadevertantly hired incompetent people, because no hiring proccess is perfect. So about rejecting a super talent to avoid hiring an incompetent person. It seems that sta…

>It's hard to square that with the whole 10x engineer thing. That's because Google doesn't particularly ascribe to this idea. With good infra, tooling, and environment (management, mentorship, etc.) anyone can be "10X". >manage out inadevertantly hired incompetent people, because no hiring proccess is perfect. I'm not sure I've ever met an engineer at Google who I would call incompetent. Certainly some who are less c…

Post by killaken2000 » Thu, Apr 26, 2018, 6:20 PM UTC

kens wrote: post #191

dvt wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 lo…

Post by tbodt » Thu, Apr 26, 2018, 6:34 PM UTC

killaken2000 wrote: post #215

kens wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 lo…

Can an 8 bit calculator display/operate on numbers bigger than 2^8?

Post by killaken2000 » Thu, Apr 26, 2018, 6:38 PM UTC

TallGuyShort wrote: post #188

huhwhaa23 wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my country of origin, multiple choice tests weren't really a thing in school so it never really came up. I guess the US has multiple choice tests at all levels.

Well the incident that sticks out in my memory was actually the kind where you show your work and circle your final answer. And as long as you get that work back and are confident you can then re-check the problem and can appeal with the teacher. That's a little harder to do with multiple choice because you have to replicate how you arrived at the answer you did, but the bigger problem is a general process problem. S…