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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)

#321

Post by socrates666 »

geofft wrote: post #118
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…

> incorrect/inflexible quizzing about tech questions is inappropriate full stop I don't disagree with this, but (to the best of my memory - this was in 2011), when this initial phone screen was presented to me, it was presented with some amount of "We want to figure out what you're good at so we're having the right people interview you for the right roles." Which is to say, I suspect that him failing out halfway thro…

They can, actually...the culture needs to learn to adopt them is all.

Having real talent and having to basically navigate terrain of those with less skill than you and yet, oddly enough, more power, is very frustrating. These people can knock orders of magnitude off development cycles, and make subtle decisions that affect your product years in to the future.

If anyone feels even remotely insecure because of your prowess you are shot down. I was pushed out of Microsoft just for accomplishing a task that was supposed to be impossible "because a senior engineer said so." In other words, I did my job (I wasn't aware it was supposedly impossible) and then a management chain became incredibly uncomfortable and dumped me.

You might say I'm the problem...I point to the stack of clowns that said it couldn't be done and go...yeah sure.

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

#322

Post by sitkack »

Zach_the_Lizard wrote: post #316
sitkack wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, s…

Pramp is a community driven service to simulate live interviews as closely as possible, exactly for that reason.

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

#323

Post by quacked »

zpatel wrote: post #229
kamaal wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>And 8 interviews? Pretty standard across these AmaGoogFaceSoft like companies. They basically have too much money and time to spend on these things, and they inevitable hire people like them who have lot of free time on their hands to prepare for their textbook puzzle questions. In other words they wish to hire candidates who do bare minimum work but spend hours preparing for interviews to move to next jobs.

15-20 yrs back general app s/w hiring was not about solving algos and puzzles but more about object oriented software and threading etc.

15-20 years ago the market wasn't flooded with viable candidates and people claiming to be viable candidates

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

#324

Post by quacked »

freyir wrote: post #189
Bjartr wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google believes the opposite, that hiring the wrong person could cost that if they have a negative impact on the teams they work in so they prefer false negatives over false positives.

This happens because companies are unwilling to fire employees, even incompetent or toxic employees, for fear of lawsuit.

The lawsuits happen because people don't have real savings due to high cost of living/lifestyle inflation and reliance on employer benefits. If losing your job wasn't such a potential death sentence, I think it would be easier to fire people.

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

#325

Post by geofft »

rurban wrote: post #314
geofft wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I've conversed with you before on this website - you are also someone who does not understand technical terms used by other people, and should fail at this stage.

It sucks, but the purpose of an interview process is not to accept everyone, and the fact that certain people (even certain technically skilled people) are rejected is not an indication by itself that the process is broken.

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

#326

Post by geofft »

jiveturkey wrote: post #295
pjc50 wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From their linkedin? > TrustLeap, the security division of TWD Industries AG (founded in 1998), protects digital assets with cryptanalytically unbreakable technology (safe against unlimited computing power as it is proven mathematically that no key leaks can be exploited). Riiight.

it is actually possible. one time pad

Key leaks of a one-time pad can be exploited.

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

#327

Post by geofft »

fwdpropaganda wrote: post #311
geofft wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

As I and others have said a few times on this thread and on 2016's thread, there are a huge number of sources of people saying "I got the same question" and "The question was 'What is the signal sent by the kill command.'"

So there are two possibilities:

1. This particular interviewer actually said "What is the name of the KILL signal," despite other interviewers regularly saying the question correctly. The entire thesis of this article is that the interviewer does not understand UNIX and is reading pre-written questions from a piece of paper, so that's an extremely unlikely mistake for the interviewer to make.

2. He misheard the question.

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

#328

Post by geofft »

crdoconnor wrote: post #309
geofft wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I admit that this is certainly possible (Google recruiters wildly underleveling people, at least relative to their expectations if not their actual qualifications, and not clarifying this before passing the candidate onto other recruiters). If it's happening, it's a very different problem (no less real of a problem, though) and process fixes at this stage wouldn't help. Also, this interview performance should have be…

It's not only possible it's likely if they are setting general hiring quotas for their recruiters. And, they almost certainly are setting quotas because they're currently being sued by one of their own recruiters over their quota policy. >Also, this interview performance should have been enough to disqualify this candidate They neither qualify him nor disqualify him. Correctly or near correctly answered trivia questi…

> They neither qualify him nor disqualify him. Correctly or near correctly answered trivia questions tell you almost nothing about a candidate other than that they're probably a software engineer of some kind.

Please read the entire sentence you quoted halfway - by "interview performance" I don't mean the correctness of the answers, I mean his a) expectation that UNIX trivia quizzes are a normal part of a director-level interview (and that it's not more likely that there was a miscommunication in scheduling) and b) attitude.

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

#329

Post by geofft »

socrates666 wrote: post #321
geofft wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> incorrect/inflexible quizzing about tech questions is inappropriate full stop I don't disagree with this, but (to the best of my memory - this was in 2011), when this initial phone screen was presented to me, it was presented with some amount of "We want to figure out what you're good at so we're having the right people interview you for the right roles." Which is to say, I suspect that him failing out halfway thro…

They can, actually...the culture needs to learn to adopt them is all. Having real talent and having to basically navigate terrain of those with less skill than you and yet, oddly enough, more power, is very frustrating. These people can knock orders of magnitude off development cycles, and make subtle decisions that affect your product years in to the future. If anyone feels even remotely insecure because of your pro…

> These people can knock orders of magnitude off development cycles, and make subtle decisions that affect your product years in to the future.

These people can also introduce orders of magnitude into development cycles, and make subtle decisions that affect the product in negative ways years into the future. I seem to have made a career out of cleaning up after these people, and I have no sympathy for them. An amazing research project or tech demo isn't an amazing sustainable project.

> I was pushed out of Microsoft just for accomplishing a task that was supposed to be impossible "because a senior engineer said so." In other words, I did my job (I wasn't aware it was supposedly impossible) and then a management chain became incredibly uncomfortable and dumped me.

When I've seen this, it's usually because the task can be done 90% in a straightforward way but 100% is impossible, and the person doing the task thinks that doing it 90% counts, possibly because they're unaware of how important the the remaining 10% is, and no amount of explanation will convince them they're seeing the problem wrong. Then they should be let go, not because they did the task, but because they're unable to understand requirements and wasting both the time of others and their own time.

... all that said, there's a very good place for this type of person: small businesses. That seems to be where the author of this article is, right now. He's got some weird ideas about how computers work, that are probably not right, but maybe they are right and he's a genius and we're all years behind him. He's built a product around those ideas. If he can sell the product, more power to him. If he can't, and the product is meeting 90% but not 100% of his customers' requirements, they just don't buy and go to a competitor. No awkward conversations about firing, no wasted time trying to get their existing hire to perform instead of hiring people who can do the job, etc. And the burden of getting him to learn how to understand requirements is entirely on him and not on anyone else.

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

#330

Post by geekbird »

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…

Whereas I think the screener had an overinflated sense of both his knowledge, importance and the "rightness" of the answers that he expected. The questions were narrow, and the right/wrong on the answers was oversimplistic and more suited to a freshman computing college test, not the working world. The guy answered him with more nuance and detail, but he arrogantly told the guy to "learn more about...", when it's pretty obvious that the appicant knew more than the screener.
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