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

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

#261

Post by s17n »

RightMillennial wrote: post #64
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.

To avoid bias? As in to be completely unprepared? Wouldn't reading the résumé give you a better idea of the interviewee's background, and allow you to better assess him?

I'm not there to figure out how good the candidate is at the things they claim to be good at. I'm there to figure out how good they are at the things the company wants them to be good at.

(Not trying to claim that I'm actually able to figure out much of anything in a technical interview, but that's the goal.)

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

#262

Post by geofft »

pinewurst wrote: post #220
product50 wrote: post #200

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.

Correct, but you can accept/decline the offer based on team placement. You don't have to accept and then see what your options are.

(For complicated reasons I actually spent about May through July of last summer with an offer open, and talked to 5 or 6 different teams through that process... and at the end of the process when I called to decline, I was told that headcount had shifted for Q3, the team I'd most recently spoken to had lost their open headcount, but there were other teams that had now had open headcount and might be interested in talking.)

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

#263

Post by wyldfire »

SilasX wrote: post #198
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…

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

"Bullet dodged" -- he did you a huge favor.

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

#265

Post by juancampa »

dman wrote: post #232
DannyBee wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It turns out this post is from 2016 and i already said the exact same thing then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12701272

DannyBee discovered to be idempotent.

Functionally pure

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

#266

Post by drama_mean »

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…

You a G! My sentiments exactly. We are at a critical point in our world where we are the "magicians" and just chasing a paycheck isn't good enough. Interesting work isn't good enough. Making a positive impact on the world is the bare minimum....

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

#267

Post by fwdpropaganda »

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…

> In which case, screening out someone with an inflated sense of their own experience and overconfidence that the stupid person on the other end of the phone is stupid is exactly what this process is supposed to do.

This is obviously an excuse for how shitty the interviewer is. If you want to rule out people with a inflated sense of their own experience, the way you do that does NOT involve telling them they're wrong when they're obviously right ("that's not the answer I have on my sheet of paper").

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

#268

Post by itronitron »

joshuamorton wrote: post #140
eitally wrote: post #8

> Recruiter: that's not the answer I have on my sheet of paper. This is the problem. Google hires as such ridiculous volume (onboarding >5000 people last quarter, and on average growing at ~10000 employees (FTEs) per year) that the process gets abstracted into whatever Google thinks can be done algorithmically. This makes almost no sense for most roles, including any type of specialist as well as middle/senior manage…

>This makes almost no sense for most roles, including any type of specialist as well as middle/senior management, and you end up with situations like you faced. Worth noting that for specialist roles and middle/senior management, there are special pipelines. The problems seems to be a mismatch in what the average person thinks is "specialist" and what Google thinks is specialist. Lots of people think they're speciali…

>> the generalist SWE pipeline

which begs the question, what are all those software engineers actually doing?

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

#269

Post by itronitron »

drdeadringer wrote: post #211
s17n wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

What is the interviewer's job?

The interviewer's job should be to determine whether, and how, the candidate would succeed in the organization.

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

#270

Post by danpalmer »

warty wrote: post #248
pinewurst wrote: post #2

Another data point - I had a very similar Google recruiter "test", being disdainfully dismissed because I couldn't/wouldn't regurgitate the same incorrect template answers they had. I've since terminated any approaches by Google recruiters as being a waste of my time and emotional energy.

According to their recruiters, I "need to learn Java and algorithms" to get an FTE phone screen.

I had this when I applied as a grad. I wasn’t clear what they were looking for so I asked if they were looking for algorithms and language agnostic programming ability, or whether they were looking for Java and Java standard library knowledge. They wanted the latter, just Java. I didn’t continue my application.
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