Google's “Director of Engineering” Hiring Test • Hacker News Board

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

#261

Post by beamatronic » Thu, Oct 13, 2016, 5:03 PM UTC

kmonsen wrote: post #44

kkapelon wrote: post #12

They asked me the same questions back in 2012. I was applying for a Java developer position. The person asking the questions said right from the start that he is not technical (he was a psychologist) and that he had a cheatsheet in front of him. I passed that telephone call and failed the process later on another call (on the lightbulbs and the 100 floor building) Really surprised to see that 4 years later they still…

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.

It makes sense if they want a firewall from the public, a legally defensible position, while behind the scenes they hire via other channels ( close friends )

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

#262

Post by geofft » Thu, Oct 13, 2016, 5:03 PM UTC

ryandrake wrote: post #173

MaxfordAndSons wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I lost it at this one. As if there is some single point of failure that's going to bring all of Google down, and some intrepid director of engineering has to inspect some TCP packets by hand to fix it.

This is where I threw up my hands too. The Director of Engineering does not need to know the difference between SIGTERM and SIGKILL, or how many bytes are in a MAC address. I guess it's a nice bonus if he does, but he'll spending 10 hours per day in meetings talking about roadmaps, shielding his team from the execs, and removing productivity roadblocks. "Third engineer from the left" is doing the packet inspection--a…

Reading more closely, it sounds like they are not interviewing him for a director of engineering position; it just sounds like he thinks his current role, CEO-who-writes-code of a very small software company (http://www.gwan.com/about), qualifies him for a director-of-engineering-level position. He's probably being interviewed for an SRE team lead or thereabouts.

Why he's being interviewed for that position is a different question entirely, and I can imagine Google being totally right or totally wrong.

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

#263

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Oct 13, 2016, 5:03 PM UTC

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…

[deleted]

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

#264

Post by yongjik » Thu, Oct 13, 2016, 5:03 PM UTC

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

No no no, this is Google. You must start a MapReduce, or whatever replaced it these days.

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

#265

Post by alttab » Thu, Oct 13, 2016, 5:04 PM UTC

jknoepfler wrote: post #176

edanm wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This strikes me as an entirely trivial point, the meaning of the question was pretty clear. It wasn't "what is the literal return value". Many APIs will return error codes, and people still talk about them as "returning" certain values colloquially. Of course, if the OP's answer would've been "it returns an error code :) but I assume you're talking about..." I would think that's fine. Btw, that is the only thing I re…

There's a precise distinction, and thinking about it as "returning" anything other than an error code is chummy human thinking rather than the sort of precise knowledge the test was (supposedly) looking for. The question was actually worse than asking "I'm thinking of a number between 1 and 10, what is it?" because rather than applying a random filter to candidates, it punished the candidate for having precise knowle…

The difference is memory management, completely different. Don't ask me for a function that "Returns" something in a technical interview and when I call you out on it say I'm wrong, when I'm not.

It's a technical interview, the question should have been technically correct. "What function passes by-reference copies of inodes?"

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

#266

Post by dkonofalski » Thu, Oct 13, 2016, 5:05 PM UTC

nickpsecurity wrote: post #233

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.

"This seems like the perfect exercise to test someone's ability to navigate those kinds of required skills." I disagree. The Q&A process isn't indicative of almost any skills on the job except patients when your time is being wasted in a formal process. He'd have to have memorized every trivial, algorithmic fact plus their textbook (not real-world!) answers with no further knowledge or answers. Such a candidate is no…

You seem to have misunderstood. The "required skills" in question are communications skills, not technical skills. This wasn't a technical interview with an engineering team member as they seemed to think. This was a personality/psychological examination to make sure that their personality and communications skills match up with the culture and personality at Google. Directors typically don't do the low-level, high-skill technical work at companies like Google. They need to understand it, but, first and foremost, they need to be able to communicate with people of varying technical skill levels. This Q&A process, as you called it, is completely indicative of a person's communications skills.

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

#267

Post by k__ » Thu, Oct 13, 2016, 5:05 PM UTC

Good to see that recruiting is broken for big positions too.

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

#268

Post by pjlegato » Thu, Oct 13, 2016, 5:05 PM UTC

segmondy wrote: post #56

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…

People that have been around know such things. At one point, Richard Stevens (RIP) was god. Every programmer had a copy of TCP/IP illustrated, Advanced Unix Programming and Unix Network Programming. If you wanted to do anything network, you had to write your own servers, you had to understand the details. The breath of knowledge was wide and the depth was just as deep. Ask around on HN, and you will probably be shock…

And then, the world developed robust, well-maintained, open source libraries that do all of that for you. Now, in 99% of commercial software engineering, you don't actually need to know any of those details, in the same sense that you no longer need to know exactly how many transistors and diodes are used to build the adder on the CPU. It simply no longer matters in almost all cases. Your time is much better spent moving on to higher level problems.

If you're interviewing for the rare 1% case where the job will actually require you to tinker with a TCP stack, then by all means ask about those details. For 99% of programming jobs today, it's irrelevant trivia used as nothing more than an ego measuring device.

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

#269

Post by darioush » Thu, Oct 13, 2016, 5:05 PM UTC

This is exactly on par with my experience with them -- I was interviewing and a particular engineer just wouldn't let me move forward with "linked list" because he wanted me to say "queue".

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

#270

Post by joesmo » Thu, Oct 13, 2016, 5:05 PM UTC

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…

Yup, those are SRE questions, but the fact that Google didn't interview him for the position he applied for makes them out to be even bigger idiots than I had them pegged at for using SRE questions on a director role. Regardless, just having such a stupid process exposed reflects badly on Google. In my own experience, Google isn't even able to call at the scheduled time so, while not the worst interviewers ever, they're pretty close and very far down the ladder. Put it another way, I doubt they could convince many to even interview without their extremely hefty compensation packages.