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Google's “Director of Engineering” Hiring Test

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

#251

Post by [deleted] »

scrollaway wrote: post #135
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…

"Dumb recruiter"? What? Nobody's calling the recruiter dumb. Everybody is calling the process dumb. A process that puts somebody that cannot answer these questions, in charge of asking them and evaluating the answers. Having the candidate evaluate the competence of their recruiter is not part of the interview process. What the hell.

[deleted]

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

#252

Post by anuj_nm »

DannyBee wrote: post #152

FWIW: As a director of engineering for Google, who interviews other directors of engineering for Google, none of these are on or related to the "director of engineering" interview guidelines or sheets. These are bog standard SWE-SRE questions (particularly, SRE) at some companies, so my guess is he was really being evaluated for a normal SWE-SRE position. IE maybe he applied to a position labeled director of engineer…

I was asked pretty much the same questions for an SRE position at Google. Note that I only found the recruiter phone screen to be this kind of 'pop quiz'. The engineering interviews were more detailed discussions with engineers.

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

#253

Post by dekhn »

lucb1e wrote: post #216
dekhn wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

only some hash functions are fingerprints. Other hash functions are the exact opposite of a fingerprint.

I know some hash functions are not meant to create unique fingerprints (they're to pick a bucket to put/look in), but what do you mean by the opposite of a fingerprint?

The goal of a fingerprint hash is to convert an input space of "large" values to an output space where the output space values are much shorter- typically fixed size and two similar input values have effectively random outputs (without spending the CPU cycles to implement a cryptographic hash). This permits a wide range of optimizations (a document can be fingerprinted, and looked up by its fingerprint, to see if it's a cache, has associated data, etc).

A non-fingerprinting hash function - well, one example of one- is something that for similar inputs, produces the same output (similarity being defined by some distance metric). See, for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locality-sensitive_hashing and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MinHash

Confusingingly, many functions that are used for similarity detection are called Fingerprints, (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acoustic_fingerprint), but I consider that a distinct use of the term.

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

#254

Post by jnbiche »

DannyBee wrote: post #152

FWIW: As a director of engineering for Google, who interviews other directors of engineering for Google, none of these are on or related to the "director of engineering" interview guidelines or sheets. These are bog standard SWE-SRE questions (particularly, SRE) at some companies, so my guess is he was really being evaluated for a normal SWE-SRE position. IE maybe he applied to a position labeled director of engineer…

On one hand you say that these are "bog-standard" SRE questions, and on the other you say it's "super strange".

What exactly is super strange? That a non-technical recruiter asked the questions? If that's not the strange part, then surely it's believable that the recruiter would not recognize some of the subtleties involved?

That said, if this guy is the creator of GWAN, then it's entirely possible that his personality rubbed someone the wrong way and he was nixed for "personality reasons" in the only way they could.

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

#255

Post by ggambetta »

chrismorgan wrote: post #131
ryandrake wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are the components that make up a color? "Well, it depends what color model you are using, which differentiates between additive and subtractive color mixing, the medium used (print, screen, etc.)... No. It's Red, Green, and Blue.

But hang on, the primary colours are red, yellow and blue! I know, they told me so in primary school.

Not sure how much you're kidding, but... that's true for a subtractive colour system, where you start with a white sheet of paper (i.e. reflects every wavelength) and subtract colours (filter out wavelengths) by painting over the paper with crayons. For an additive colour system, where you start with a black monitor screen, and you add wavelengths, the primaries are RGB.

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

#256

Post by biocomputation »

gmarx wrote: post #142

"There's an array of 10,000 16-bit values, how do you count the bits most efficiently?" multiply 10,000 by 16. There are 160,000 bits

My sarcastic reply is to your very reasonable answer is:

On the x86 architecture, integer multiplies take more cycles than a comparable solution that uses bit twiddling so you're just WRONG!

You are the weakest link, GOODBYE!

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

#258

Post by pjlegato »

This well illustrates the problem with "CS Trivia" style interviewing. It's billed as "exploring your background and how you think, not quizzing you for specific answers," but almost always devolves into an adversarial ego-measuring contest to see who can recite the most trivia from memory.

Much of of the content is minutiae that a working software engineer doesn't ever need to know and would just look up in the rare case where they did (how many bytes in a MAC address? Seriously?).

It's particularly bad when, as here, the candidate knows more than the interviewer does. The interviewee gives exact, nuanced answers while the interviewer only knows approximately correct answers that don't quite match. The interviewer then feels that their ego is vulnerable, that they are facing a serious potential competitor for social status at the company. They then summarily reject the candidate's correct answers as a defense mechnaism.

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

#259

Post by Ph0X »

kzisme wrote: post #151
kmonsen wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is really weird and should not be happening. I am a software developer and do a lot of interviews including phone interviews. These kind of questions are not expected, but I would say the lightbulb one is not super horrible as long as it is the discussion that was valued and not the answer. I have gotten weirder questions for sure when interviewing.

I didn't hear about the light bulb drop question until this thread, and was surprised how in-depth it can go. Can you really "fail" an interview on a question like that? I assume the person conducting the interview is reviewing your process of coming to an answer rather than getting the most correct answer - right? By most correct I found this article that broke down the question/answer: https://pointlessprogramming.…

In theory, that's basically the idea of most questions asked during interviews (except maybe very basic CS ones). The idea is that they will look at how you approach the problems. If you already know it and spew out a memorized answer, it's much less interesting to them than if you've never heard it before and you approach it with a clever way (even if you don't get the answer).

But yes, in practice, YMMV.

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

#260

Post by dkonofalski »

philjr wrote: post #203
dkonofalski wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is that wrong? As a Director, you'd have to deal with people at all different levels of understanding. You may even have to deal with companies, clients, and other departments that have zero skill in your area of expertise. This seems like the perfect exercise to test someone's ability to navigate those kinds of required skills.

I don't disagree, although I'm sceptical that's intentional on Google's part. I think if you applied some common sense to the situation and you were able to get off your moral high horse about what's correct vs answering the questions he needs you to answer to get to the actual proper interviews. Dale Carnegie wouldn't have approved, I'm sure.

What makes you skeptical, though? If anything, there are two things that make me almost certain of it:

1. The author of the post says that this was a phone call. That means that this, more than likely, is not a transcript of the call, but a paraphrase. The entire tone of the post lends itself to the author thinking that they're "correct" and that the interviewer was just a rude, monosyllabic simpleton.

2. The interview ended immediately after the author started to argue. Instead of trying to relate to the person and simplify their answers after the first few super-technical answers weren't accepted, they trudged on with the attitude of "this person has no idea what they're talking about and this is stupid" rather than "I'm clearly overshooting the mark here, maybe I should try and simplify the answers".

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