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

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

#351

Post by jxramos » Thu, Oct 13, 2016, 5:40 PM UTC

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…

I think the interviewee after realizing the shortcomings of the tester's understanding and the author of said "right answers" should have interrupted or ended the probing after a few red flags and politely suggested something along the following lines...

"Look I get the gist of what this screening is trying to do but please write down my answers and feed them to the technical staff who authored this Q&A and have them verify their misunderstandings and have them get back to me please. I am very confident you all have subtle details mixed up and could benefit by a strong candidate who understands such details with a higher level of fidelity."

Guess its another loss given to the recruitment focus on avoiding false positives over false negatives.

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

#352

Post by omginternets » Thu, Oct 13, 2016, 5:40 PM UTC

This entire transcript reads like a metaphor for democracy.

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

#353

Post by skywhopper » Thu, Oct 13, 2016, 5:40 PM UTC

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…

> 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

Depends on what you actually do in your job, I suppose. If you use that information regularly or troubleshoot networks regularly you would soon enough memorize it.

> and if you need the specifics, you'll find out with a single search.

Someone doing network programming _does_ need the specifics.

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

#354

Post by deadmik3 » Thu, Oct 13, 2016, 5:41 PM UTC

smrtinsert wrote: post #231

caoilte wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only way this makes "sense" is if you already have the candidate (or pool of H1-B candidates) you want in mind, but have to prove you opened up the position to the general public first.

My company posts positions available in a common area as part of an H1B related initiative in order to verify that no US techie wants the job before they go looking for the candidate. They were offering around .6 of typical salary given position and location. Shameful what is happening in tech right now, absolutely shameful.

I interned at a large company that stapled stacks of job descriptions labeled "H1-B OPPORTUNITY" on bulletin boards outside the elevators. They listed salaries that were super underpaid, and everyone I worked with was clearly an H1-B employee. It's disgusting how shameless some of these companies are.

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

#355

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Oct 13, 2016, 5:41 PM UTC

WillPostForFood wrote: post #219

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…

I'm amazed people actually believe the account is accurate. The guy failed the interview, and goes to write a blog post to lash out at google (and try to mess up future interviews for them), So of course he write it to make him look good, and the questioner bad. We will stop here because it's obvious that you don't have the necessary skills to write or review network applications. You should learn the Linux function…

[deleted]

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

#356

Post by KirinDave » Thu, Oct 13, 2016, 5:43 PM UTC

greg7mdp wrote: post #3

Hahaha, that is funny/tragic. Outsourcing hiring a director of engineering to a moron with a cheat sheet! Your answers were great, though, and indeed on the systems I have tried the popcount() computation with the bit shifts you suggested is faster than using an 8 bit lookup table. (however the SSE4 popcnt ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SSE4#POPCNT_and_LZCNT ) is faster still).

While I think these things are super interesting trivia, I really want to ask the question: "Why does a Director of Engineering for Google need to know this?" That is not only a rather unusual question (within the scope of daily tasks for a programmer, these tend to be an important minority for a project), but it's one that's best settled empirically and within the context of your execution environment.

There are a lot of different answers to the question depending on where you're doing it and how you want to impact the machine.

It's a bizarre question to pose to Director level, because the proper response even for a technical director should be, "The answer to that changes quickly, we should measure and check what our environment's latest capabilities are and if they are reliable."

I mean I'm all gung ho to program stuff, but I think that'd be a massive misapplication of my time with that title in my current job, and given my other responsibilities I'd only do it more slowly than someone with dedicated focus.

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

#357

Post by spicyj » Thu, Oct 13, 2016, 5:44 PM UTC

yalogin wrote: post #308

Why would a person interviewing for a director position let a recruiter do a tech screen? Wouldn't it at least be respectful for the hiring manager to do this evaluation? Something is very off here. Or does Google use the same "we have a generic interview and if you get through we will then decide which team to place you in" crap for director level hires as well?

Google almost certainly receives many thousands of applications for the position. It sounds like this particular "prescreen" may be badly designed, but after a prescreen you'd certainly expect to talk to more technically-literate and -competent people.

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

#358

Post by qznc » Thu, Oct 13, 2016, 5:44 PM UTC

intrasight wrote: post #295

The process seems geared towards hiring people right out of school since they'd have no expectation that such a candidate would be able to answer such questions. Am I right in thinking that it's easier to become a Googler by starting a company that gets acquired than by submitting to such a broken interview process?

I assume the easiest way to get into Google/Apple/Facebook is an internship.

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

#359

Post by dordoka » Thu, Oct 13, 2016, 5:45 PM UTC

AlexCoventry wrote: post #166

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…

I actually believe they rejected him because he didn't show proper people/social skills. The tone of the post, forgetting the part about his resume, looks like it's written by an angry teenager.

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

#360

Post by ktsmith » Thu, Oct 13, 2016, 5:46 PM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #52

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…

I knew all these answers too, because I was a developer in the 1990s. There is absolutely no purpose to knowing off the top of your head how long an ethernet address is, or even what system call will retrieve an inode (his bickering over stat() "filling in" rather than "returning" was bogus, for what it's worth). The top Google search result for each of these questions has the answer. Knowing these things isn't part…

What's bogus about his comment on stat() exactly. It literally returns an int and fills in the struct that it takes as a parameter. If he had no idea what it did he could check Google or the man pages which are going to give him some variety of the same answer such as the two examples below.

Linux:

    int stat(const char *path, struct stat *buf);

    stat() stats the file pointed to by path and fills in buf.

Mac OS X 10.11:

    int stat(const char *restrict path, struct stat *restrict buf);

    The stat() function obtains information about the file pointed to by path.  
    Read, write or execute permission of the named file is not
    required, but all directories listed in the path name leading to the file must be searchable.

It may be pedantic but stat definitely doesn't "return" an inode. One of the problems with technical interviews like this is you often have no idea what the interviewer is really looking for. Some might just want to know what you would use to get the information about an inode and another might be seeing how you describe it as a test of your knowledge of pointers or something. Often it's impossible to know and that could have been easily a trick question where the right answer is "there isn't one but you can use stat to get this information as it takes a struct pointer and will place the information into that struct". Of course you know that better than most or you wouldn't have made stockfigher.