231–240 of 344 posts
> 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.
So, as part of my job, I have been the hiring manager for directors for Google (3 in the past 6 months), and recruit quite a bit. This was a simple phone screen, and it seems the recruiter was not given a good set of questions. However, I actually doubt it was really a director of engineering screen, despite this person's experience level (maybe it should have been, but ...). I say this because I know a lot of the le…
It turns out this post is from 2016 and i already said the exact same thing then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12701272
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…
>Also, a ton of this conversation makes a lot more sense if you make the assumption that the interviewee is misremembering the questions But (per [1]) then what would be the charitable mis-remembering of the recruiter saying "that's not the answer I have on my sheet of paper." If it were someone technically competent, that would never be the response; it would be a technical explanation of the error. The most likely…
I'm not disagreeing with this - this certainly appears to be the case.
But I think a qualified technical person should be able to understand the question that the non-technical person is asking and respond in a useful way. Although, yes, if they immediately respond with "Wrong, it's ", it's hard to do that. But I feel like a good interviewer (good is orthogonal to technical!) is likely to say "OK, so what is the runtime?", and "constant" and "O(1)" should both be on their list of keywords.
My charitable mis-remembering would be that the transcript here skipped these sorts of prompts, or that the interviewer was actually upset at the interviewee's demeanor/attitude already and wanted to cut the interview short by that point and was just trying to finish their block of questions. (Which I think is legitimate. As a technical interviewer, if you start condescending to me during the interview, I'm much less likely to give you the benefit of the doubt and help you along with Socratic hints.)
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.
> You dont get those types of salaries elsewhere easily. Except for all of the other big tech companies?
Many of which have the same type of interview processes?
Hell, Facebook sometimes asks two coding questions per interview round, which is 45 minutes long as I recall. They seem to expect perfectly compiling code.
If you're not doing coding competitions or practicing on Leetcode or other sites of its ilk, where you learn to regurgitate a Knapsack problem solution or Russian nesting doll problem in ~15 minutes, you're going to have a hard time getting into many of the big tech companies unless you went to a university that teaches using this style.
I've seen the sort of problem that required dynamic programing combined with a binary search for the algorithmically optimal solution in a phone screen!
I lucked into an easier interview loop, crushed it, and got hired and performed well at one of these types of big companies.
But I dread jumping ships because of this daunting interview hoop we jump through.
I've already tried to leave and got smacked around in the two interviews I went through because of nerves. I knew the problems, I knew how to solve them, but for some reason I just didn't perform well and couldn't really cross the finish line.
This pisses me off so bad: Quicksort does NOT have "the best big-O". It's big-O time complexity is O(n^2). Big-O refers to the worst case time complexity. Quicksort will on average take (n log n) time complexity, but that's not its big-O, that's its big-Theta. Some try to skirt this by saying "if you randomize the order of the data first, it will be sorted in big-O of n log n" but again, that's the average time compl…
Big-Theta is not an average case, it is a special form of Big-O and Big-Omega wherein the worst case is also the best case from a complexity perspective. This is sometimes true in sorting since comparison based sorting cannot be improved beyond n*log(n) except in specific cases for specific domains. You are absolutely on the money about worst case being O(n^2) though for quicksort.
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
But is that true? I thought one interviewed for a generic slot at Google, with actual team placement being done after hiring to fill the slot.
So, as part of my job, I have been the hiring manager for directors for Google (3 in the past 6 months), and recruit quite a bit. This was a simple phone screen, and it seems the recruiter was not given a good set of questions. However, I actually doubt it was really a director of engineering screen, despite this person's experience level (maybe it should have been, but ...). I say this because I know a lot of the le…
OK, you've established your credentials, and cast a bit of doubt on the accuracy of everything in the linked post by pointing out a likley inaccuracy about the actual position.
But at no point do you claim that the phone screen didn't actually go like that. Nor do you offer defense of a call that did go like that.
And isn't that the part of the post that really matters? If that retelling of the call is even 30% true, Google flubbed it. Hard.