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Google's “Director of Engineering” Hiring Test

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

#161

Post by leshow »

Google doesn't ask these types of trivia questions. I don't believe that you were talking to a person from Google one bit.

Everything documented about their hiring practices and anecdotal evidence from people gone through their interview process is that you talk with a real engineer and write code for your interview.

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

#162

Post by trelliscoded »

lordnacho wrote: post #13

I'm amazed he knew things in such detail. I mean who would know just how long a MAC address is? Or what the actual SYN/ACK etc tcp flags are? You just need to know what they're used for, and if you need the specifics, you'll find out with a single search. He seemed to know that as well though. Kernighan for bit twiddling algos, that kind of thing. It's a bit strange to have someone non-technical interviewing a techie…

If you've had to troubleshoot network corruption at scale, you memorize packet details real fast :)

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

#164

Post by loeg »

drewg123 wrote: post #48
lordnacho wrote: post #13

I'm amazed he knew things in such detail. I mean who would know just how long a MAC address is? Or what the actual SYN/ACK etc tcp flags are? You just need to know what they're used for, and if you need the specifics, you'll find out with a single search. He seemed to know that as well though. Kernighan for bit twiddling algos, that kind of thing. It's a bit strange to have someone non-technical interviewing a techie…

It tends to be incredibly helpful to know details like the length of a mac address and what tcp flags mean what if you're looking at an unformatted memory dump. One example of how this can be handy is when doing low-level NIC bring up, I've read PCIe TLPs from a logic analyzer to correlate them to network traffic.

I bet you spent more than 30 minutes (typical phone screen length) looking at TLPs. Spending 2 minutes to google DLLP/TLP packet structure is not unreasonable.

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

#166

Post by AlexCoventry »

Isn't a Director of Engineering meant to be an interface between engineers and the rest of the organization? Perhaps this was more like a smoke test for the political insight such a role calls for, not the ostensible test of technical skill it was presented as. After the first couple of wrong answers, people with the right social skills to manage others and represent their interests to the broader organization would stop striving to prove their technical chops, clarify what kinds of answers the test is looking for, and adjust their subsequent answers accordingly.

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

#167

Post by loeg »

philjr wrote: post #78

Without actually hearing the transcript verbatim, it's hard to give much enlightened perspective here, but there's a lot of "hur hur, dumb recruiter" responses here. What I will say, in general, is that figuring out what the "right" answers are here for what is obviously a technical phone screen by a non-technical person with answers on a piece of paper is also part of the challenge. This is a Director of Engineering…

The non-technical recruiter is asking technical questions with technical answers, but without the technical expertise to consider correct answers that are not literally the same words as the ones they have been given. That is not a good way to interview.

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

#168

Post by InclinedPlane »

This reads as an indictment of the entire hiring culture of the tech industry, which it is. Hiring is one of the most important things any company ever does. It's also one of the biggest opportunities to attain a competitive advantage. And it's one of the most difficult tasks that any developer will ever participate in. And yet, consistently there is a lack of seriousness when it comes to hiring, and a reliance on bad, counterproductive cargo cult practices. It's not just embarrassing for this industry it has a big impact on the quality of life of developers and the quality of developer talent at companies. If you want to hire good people you need to put a lot of resources into it. And that means you can't just hand off these sorts of important tasks to interns who don't know what they're talking about. Hiring, even at the phone screen level, is not like comcast customer service, and any company that treats it that way is setting themselves up for failure.

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

#169

Post by steven777400 »

protomyth wrote: post #79
enjoylife wrote: post #33

What the heck is a "Quicksort big-O score"? I've never heard anyone use the noun score when talking about complexity analysis.

I assume they want the average O(n log n), but who the heck knows given the script from above. I get the feeling this: http://bigocheatsheet.com would come in handy

Big-O technically means "worst case", which for Quicksort is O(n^2), although usually (in normal cases) it runs better than that. Other sort algorithms can guarantee not worse than O(n log n).
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