Google's “Director of Engineering” Hiring Test
411–420 of 969 posts
Re: Google's “Director of Engineering” Hiring Test
#412Earlier 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…
"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.."
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how we ended up with npm.
Re: Google's “Director of Engineering” Hiring Test
#413Earlier 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.
I know some companies do this, but this is Google. There's no incentive for them to hire H1-B's if a equally qualified American citizen is available, since they are going to pay equal salary.
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Re: Google's “Director of Engineering” Hiring Test
#414anyone have a mirror ?
Webcache from Google: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:rPrtrh1...
Re: Google's “Director of Engineering” Hiring Test
#415Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 personali…
the questions asked don't strike me as strange, but the corrected answers/explanations by the recruiter are very strange indeed.
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Re: Google's “Director of Engineering” Hiring Test
#416Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is the SRE prescreen. At least it's the one I was asked in 2007, almost verbatim. Possibly too verbatim.
Also, his answer on #9 is wrong, or at least his explanation of the conversation is terribly confusing With 10000 numbers, it's only efficient to create a lookup table with 8-bit integers, not with 16-bit integers. Based on his LinkedIn profile, I don't think anyone at Google would have thought of him as a "director of engineering". Being an "R&D director" at some unknown company at 24 is entirely un-comparable to a…
Do you recall the question? Site's down. I recall thinking the right answer was to use POPCNT but maybe I'm misremembering the question.
Re: Google's “Director of Engineering” Hiring Test
#417Earlier 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…
"Now, in 99% of commercial software engineering"
Whatever this thing... this... stringing together a 100 random github projects to get a webpage that kinda of works about 80% of the time is called -- please let's agree not to call it "software engineering".
Re: Google's “Director of Engineering” Hiring Test
#418I'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.
I was asked similar questions when I was hired as an SRE nine years ago. The recruiter stopped after a few correct answers, iirc. There was probably at least one I didn't know / guessed wrong on, but I don't remember. They also asked me to rank my knowledge in several areas on a scale of 1-10, and I think the questions focused on areas in which I'd chosen higher grades. Following conversations with engineers also focused on those areas.
As I understand it, this is meant to be a shibboleth a non-technical recruiter can use to spot an experienced software engineer / sysadmin in a quick conversation ("pre-screen"). That's a hard thing to pull off. They can't ask someone to design a system, diagnose a problem, or write code because they're unqualified to grade the answer. Instead, they ask some simple canned questions. The questions may not test essential, first principles sorts of knowledge, but if someone can't answer any of them it's a bad sign. The questions should have a small family of correct answers that recruiters can recognize, and the recruiter should just see that a candidate can get some of them right before scheduling a phone screen with a Google engineer. If the transcript is accurate, this process failed.
Re: Google's “Director of Engineering” Hiring Test
#419FWIW: 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…
Disclaimer: I also work for Google, opinions are my own, etc etc. > "i always take "transcripts" of interviews (or anything else) with a grain of salt" I mean sure, a single instance of this might be overblown, exaggerated, or false in some way. But there is an avalanche of reports like this, to the point where it's become widespread industry insider knowledge. I enjoy working here, but the interviewing practices are…
(Same disclaimer)
If you interview frequently, at least for SWE, this is certainly not how we go about things. ghire guidelines for SWE don't allow for questions like this, or behavior like this.
Is it possible this was an SRE interview? I guess, but it really sounds ungoogly and these questions sound like they don't give great signal. I'd be ashamed if this is how we hire SREs.
Is there really an "avalanche" of reports like this? Most negative reports I hear have to do with our SWE questions which tend to be difficult.
Re: Google's “Director of Engineering” Hiring Test
#420FWIW: 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…
It's an interesting recruitment setup where overqualified candidates are rejected.