Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google's “Director of Engineering” Hiring Test

gwan.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 969 posts

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

#41

Post by TheCapn »

buttershakes wrote: post #7

I had almost exactly this same engineering test when google interviewed me in 2006. It was terrible, and left a bad taste in my mouth. Given the complexity of the work I was doing at the time, the entire thing seemed ridiculous.

The inode question gave me flashbacks to my interview with Amazon. They wanted me to explain what a hash function is. I kept giving answers for about 3 minutes explaining hashing, common algorithms, reasons to use it and places it applies.

Recruiter: "I was looking for you to say it's a fingerprint"

So I guess I was wrong, because despite explaining them in decent detail, I didn't use the one keyword.

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

#42

Post by endtime »

I've been at Google for five years as a SWE and I've been interviewing for 3 of those. I'd fail this pop quiz.

This strikes me as bizarre and inconsistent with all the practices I'm aware of. The idea that we'd ask anyone this stuff, let alone director candidates, strains belief.

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

#43

Post by jdc0589 »

wow, thats especially terrible. The engineering interview pre-screen I had at Amazon was better than that. Can't imagine why a company would do this for ANY technical position, much less such a senior one.

I did have an HR pre-screen one time where they sent me a SQL literacy test (did not specify sql dialect). One of the multiple choice questions had all correct answers, in different sql dialects, with no "all of the above" option. I corrected the test. I did not get a call back.

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

#44

Post by kmonsen »

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.

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

#45

Post by jussij »

If this is true, then it's not surprising as usually the person asking the question is not up to speed on the details of the question being asked.

I recall a question, which was how do you stop a socket from overflowing?

I said what do you mean? If you write to a socket and it fails to accept the write it will fail. Sockets do not have any option to stop this.

Naturally I failed the question yet I asked for the correct answer and was told the answer is simple, just use a cache.

Nice answer, excepts sockets do not have caches.

Correct Answer: Add a cache to the socket to stop them failing but that was not the question.

While that answer is obvious, it was not the question asked!!

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

#46

Post by middleca »

Google and all the other mega-tech corps do a similar tech phone screen where they're reading off an answer sheet. (powers of 2, sort these functions, linux kernel calls, etc).

Sounds like you dodged a bullet, this sort of thing speaks volumes to how the company is run internally and how you'd be treated there.

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

#47

Post by adekok »

I'm reminded of a story about Einstein in the 1930s. The fad at the time was to have a "skills test" which was supposed to place you perfectly according to your results.

Einstein took the test, and did terribly. Everyone was shocked, and asked him what was going on. His response was "The questions tested memorization. Why would I remember what the capital of North Dakota is? I can look that up in a book!"

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the tests faded out of popularity.

It's sad that 100 years later, even Google hasn't learned that lesson.

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

#48

Post by drewg123 »

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.

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

#50

Post by johan_larson »

maverick_iceman wrote: post #32

This is very hard to believe. In most big tech companies technical interviews are conducted by technical people, not recruiters. Especially for a senior role like Director of Eng. the experience described here stretches credulity. Also most of these companies have policies which don't allow any feedback to be given on interview performance. In light of that the recruiter saying "you don't have necessary skills" is ex…

I've never interviewed for director-level positions, but I have definitely received a few technical questions from recruiters who didn't seem technical. The questions were generally easy.

I still think it's a bad practice, though. If you absolutely insist on doing so, multiple choice is the right way to go.

Post reply on HN