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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)

#311

Post by fwdpropaganda »

geofft wrote: post #290
fwdpropaganda wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Again, my claim is the interviewer did not say exactly that and this man with an inflated sense of his own qualifications is retelling the story in a way that's favorable to him. All available evidence points to him either mishearing or mis-transcribing the question, which was actually "What is the signal sent by the kill command."

What evidence is there available that points to him mishearing?

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

#312

Post by danpalmer »

RightMillennial wrote: post #296
danpalmer wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or her/them.

In standard American English, masculine is the default gender when the subject is unknown. So using "him" is proper. Using "them" as a singular pronoun is jarring to the ears.

I was not aware of this, I've mostly heard "they"/"them". I take "he" to be an awareness or assumption of the gender, and find it quite uncomfortable to hear with regards to an industry with such a strong gender imbalance.

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

#314

Post by rurban »

geofft wrote: post #223
trisimix wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Assuming he didnt lie about the exchange of words If it's not clear: I strongly believe he lied. (I don't think he intentionally lied, as in deliberately twisted what the interviewer said to make them look bad: I think he genuinely misheard the questions because understanding questions accurately when asked by someone he considers inferior is not his strength, and then incorrectly reported them, which is still lyin…

He definitely didn't lie as I got my correct answers also rejected by some HR guy with no technical background at all. Almost the same questions btw.

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

#315

Post by rurban »

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…

Nope, hardware is better. Throw popcount at it, in parallel. ispc will help you with the parallel bit if your compiler cannot autovectorize good enough.

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

#316

Post by Zach_the_Lizard »

sitkack wrote: post #310
Zach_the_Lizard wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 Ru…

I do lots of interviews of smart, well spoken people who seem to be able to decompose problems, enumerate pros and cons of various solutions and then struggle with a filter and a reduction over the lines in a file. These people are un-prepared for the interview, this question is easy and not insulting. Anyone doing tech interviews of any sort should be able to answer it, yet most don't. I suggest two things, 1) start…

> I suggest two things, 1) start doing competitive coding exercises, there are lots of problem sets available, search for "online judge" [0] and 2) practice interviewing under real conditions, use pramp [1].

Leetcode, SPOJ, and others are how I landed my current job. What was most helpful for me was actually going back and reimplementing all of the fundamental datastructures and algorithms. E.g. binary search tree, skip lists, BFS, DFS, different sorting algorithms, etc. From then, it was also helpful to remember where these were being used in the real systems I interact with.

Solving the interview problems is typically not my problem. In every round of my Google and Facebook interviews, I knew the optimal solution--confirmed by looking up the solutions after the interview. However, I happened to choke under the interview pressure and turned into a fool. Test anxiety--interview anxiety in this case--is a real thing.

What I am going to do in the next round of interviews is apply for dozens of companies I just don't care about, fail a bunch of interviews to get used to the pressure again, and then re-apply to the companies I actually care about.

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

#317

Post by jason_slack »

mirceal wrote: post #241
jason_slack wrote: post #228

One of my interview questions: Interviewer: What is the difference between a mutable and immutable string? Me: A mutable string can be changed. A immutable string cannot be changed. Interviewer: Nope, think mutations. Mutable string can be mutated. Me: Mutated? Altering DNA? Interviewer: If you don't know this there isn't any sense in asking more difficult questions. Me: Floored.

follow up: do you know that everyone is a mutant?

Sadly when she said mutation I thought about the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles :-)

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

#318

Post by rayiner »

SilasX wrote: post #286
rayiner wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know if I believe that. Lots of people (in particular folks using Windows or Mac) use the GUI version of those editors because they're preinstalled on machines at school and work. They may not even know there is a console version of those programs. (Also "window manager" is pretty *nix-specific jargon.)

I get that someone might use the default text editor. But where would a vim/emacs variant be installed that way? And if it were, why would it last for a novice any longer than "um, this is weird and doesn't do anything". Vim and emacs are only tolerable if you put the effort to learn how they work. And if you did, how would you get to the end of a tutorial without learning how to quit? You're right, it's technically…

Graphical Emacs/VIM were installed on the CS lab machines when I was in college. I’m pretty sure they were part of the default programming environment setup at my first workplace. GUI versions of these apps behave a lot like regular Windows or Mac apps. You can save with CTRL-S, etc. I can totally see how someone could be very experienced in using it and never know there is a keyboard shortcut to quit apart from the ‘x’ on the title bar.

The question would have been better if it was directed to an Emacs feature for which graphical versions didn’t obey ordinary Windows conventions.

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

#319

Post by socrates666 »

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…

At some point an inflated sense of experience is necessary to succeed in starting your own company. You have to literally believe you are capable of having a real impact. Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, etc. All were told at one point "you don't have the necessary experience for that." Or "are you fucking crazy?" Or something meant to challenge their experience. The hard realization is that none of them had the experience...but boy did they sure earn it.

Point is: arrogance isn't the curse you might think it is.

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

#320

Post by cfadvan »

socrates666 wrote: post #319
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…

At some point an inflated sense of experience is necessary to succeed in starting your own company. You have to literally believe you are capable of having a real impact. Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, etc. All were told at one point "you don't have the necessary experience for that." Or "are you fucking crazy?" Or something meant to challenge their experience. The hard realization is that none of them had the ex…

There are a handful of sociopathic people who reach those heights, while most of the rest do not. Mistaking arrogance for an active ingredient in success is probably a mistake likely to lead you down a bad road. Ruthlessness, arrogance, greed might be things you need to be a high level founder, banker, CEO or politician, but most people with those traits are abject failures. You need to be smart, and very lucky as well, and even without arrogance smart and lucky should pay off.
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