331–340 of 969 posts
The meta-question is, "Do you have the social savvy to give the conventional answers when being judged by someone who doesn't know what he is taking about?"
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…
Mediocre people can't evaluate exceptional people. What mediocre people think is knowledgeable can't be exceptional knowledge, by definition. If you want to find exceptional directors of engineering, you need an exceptional person worthy of being director of engineering to evaluate them. In seeking victory, not going beyond what everyone knows / is not skilled. Victory in battle that all-under-heaven calls skilled /…
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…
I'm just reaching here, but is there a chance at all that the test wasn't really about whether or not he knew the correct answers but more that he knew the correct answers and was able to simplify them to the extent that a non-technical user could understand and compare them? I have a feeling that Google is far more interested in someone being able to get their point across than someone that just wants to sit there a…
Is this for real? Wow. Reads like someone spoofing the real Google interview. For "Director of Engineering" they have a technical illiterate (nothing wrong with that, in other contexts) check for literal matches of answers? the mind boggles. (I'm really having a hard time believing this is for real)
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…
1) His level of knowledge is reasonable for someone who does networking programming full time 2) We are getting description from him. When I interviewed at Google, they asked me to prove that P is equal to NP, and I did, but they said that it took me longer than allotted 45 minutes and I didn't get an offer.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 di…
Take, for example, the sorting question. "Why is QuickSort the best sorting algorithm?" The answer being looked for was, "It has the best Big O."
And this is wrong. Its average case is O(n log(n)). Its worst case is O(n^2). Which do you call its big-O? Moving on, the average case of O(n log(n)) is matched by a wide variety of sorting algorithms. How do you choose one?
Here is a better answer.
QuickSort is a very simple to implement algorithm which achieves the lowest average number of operations on a randomly sorted list. Which is why it is so widely adopted despite sometimes being very slow.
However Timsort appears to be the fastest general purpose sorting algorithm for the mix of random and partially sorted lists seen in practice.
When I tend to notice that sorting is slow, generally that's a larger workload where some type of merge sort would be appropriate.
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 mo…
I feel like I've seen 2-3 articles alone in the last month that has rediscovered head-of-line blocking and UDP. I'd say 1/10 engineers I talk to even know what cache aware datastructures are.
The thing that separates someone who can just string together whatever they find on npm to people who build real systems is this deep understanding. You're not going to need this for your standard LoB apps. However if you're in the business of building software you're definitely going to want people like this.