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Google's “Director of Engineering” Hiring Test

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

#441

Post by sfrailsdev »

joesmo wrote: post #398
sfrailsdev wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From what I've heard, google intentionally screws with timing, who you will be speaking to, and other factors in order to try to understand how you deal with changes in circumstances.

Yeah, I've heard this too. If it's true, it just shows what assholes they are when it comes to respecting people's time. Which I think is the original point of the article which comes in loud and clear: Google will waste your time; don't interview there.

When I was starting out, Doing well in the Google interview process was a nice confidence booster.

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

#442

Post by Retric »

Periodic wrote: post #380
elcritch wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally, these questions and the way the recruiter asked them reaffirm my view that Google would not be a place I'd like to work at as a experienced software developer. First the recruiter's lack of technical knowledge points toward a beaurocratic or management first mindset common (necessary?) in such a large company. Second, the questions and expected answers seem biased toward just graduating but smart engineer…

I wouldn't be surprised if the interview process for experienced engineers is unrefined. At this point in Google's lifecycle most of the qualified, experienced engineers who would want to work at Google already do. There are orders of magnitude more new-grad engineers to interview and so it makes sense that they would lack the practice and refinement on those candidates, even if those are the most valuable candidates…

Google is still a tiny company relative to the US economy. They might be slightly above average on some metrics, but that’s about it. Large enough they have plenty of idiots, small enough that most smart people don't work there.

As to high standards, you are testing for things that have very little to do with someone being good at the job. High arbitrary standards often remove the most talented people who generally don't have the same background as you.

EX: Suppose you where looking for a CEO, well having a collage degree seems like a reasonable requirement. However, a surprising number the best CEOs don't.

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

#443

Post by _ivvf »

I think the candidate made a simple mistake: the interviewer is always right. Your job in an interview isn't to be right or to teach the interviewer. Your job is to make the interviewer like you foremost, and second make the interview think that you're qualified. And of course no one likes being corrected or told they are wrong. In my opinion, it is better to do well on an interview and decide after the fact that you're not interested, than to do a poor job on the interview because you couldn't help yourself correcting the other person.

For instance during one interview I was being asked questions about a particular topic, and I started to guess that the interviewer didn't understand 100% the topic he was asking about. Rather than correcting him, I simply tailored my answers to what I thought he was looking for, not what was right. I passed the interview and got a job offer, whereas if I had corrected the interviewer the results may have differed.

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

#444

Post by rifung »

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…

I realize this is a long shot, but seeing as you're actually in a pretty high position, could you try having the recruiter screen changed to be multiple choice?

It's simpler when having a non technical person asking the questions and I imagine it would lower false negatives. Frankly I don't care personally but it seems like most people would like this better.

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

#445

Post by TimonKnigge »

steven777400 wrote: post #169
protomyth wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume they want the average O(n log n), but who the heck knows given the script from above. I get the feeling this: http://bigocheatsheet.com would come in handy

Big-O technically means "worst case", which for Quicksort is O(n^2), although usually (in normal cases) it runs better than that. Other sort algorithms can guarantee not worse than O(n log n).

Depending on how the pivot is picked, Quicksort can actually be implemented in O(n lg n) worst-case time.

EDIT: I was going to link a proof for this but it's surprisingly hard to find. IIRC, the idea is to use the median of medians algorithm ([1]) to pick the median for the pivot, and deal with values equal to the pivot by alternatingly placing them in the left and right partition, or alternatively just keep them in a third partition in the middle.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_of_medians

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

#446

Post by pcwalton »

rayiner wrote: post #341
tptacek wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The length of an ethernet address is a trivia question. It's a good way to score a board game. Filtering out candidates based on it is lunacy.

I agree with the first and second sentence. As to the third: what would be your thought process as to someone who claimed to be a network programmer on the phone but couldn't answer most of those questions?

I'm a network programmer and I forgot exactly how long an Ethernet address is. (I would have guessed 6 based on memory, but I wouldn't be 100% sure.) It's an opaque structure to me; if I need the size I'll sizeof it, which is clearer anyway.

Maybe I'm a bad programmer, but I don't feel like I would be a better one with that specific fact committed to memory. I dunno.

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

#447

Post by sfrailsdev »

gubby wrote: post #437
sfrailsdev wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From what I've heard, google intentionally screws with timing, who you will be speaking to, and other factors in order to try to understand how you deal with changes in circumstances.

This is not the case (I work for Goog).

And you are on a hiring committee?

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

#448

Post by scrollaway »

dkonofalski wrote: post #431
Ph0X wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've had two phone screens with them and both times they were very technical people. Then again it was some time ago and with the bigger scale they may have changed it up. It is unfortunate, but as mentioned above, you need to just play the game until you get to the real part. It's like when I call customer support, I gotta play along with the non-technical people and get them to bump me up the chain to someone techn…

I'm glad that someone has some sense around here. I'm getting buried for saying the same thing. Everyone is making the assumption that the author of the post transcribed this interview instead of paraphrasing it. This was a culture interview, not a technical interview, and the fact that the author misinterpreted it only strengthens the interviewer's decision to not consider them further. They are very obviously not a…

Speaking of making assumptions, you're making a lot of them.

You say "Everyone is making the assumption that the author of the post transcribed this interview instead of paraphrasing it". As a member of "everyone", I disagree.

I do suspect it's not as black and white as the article makes it out to be but the general attitude is not uncommon in tech companies. It's in fact so common it has become a bit of a meme. So I'm personally taking the article with that in mind.

> This was a culture interview, not a technical interview

Oh spare me. If a "Director of Engineering at Google", above in the thread, calls the interview "super strange" and "making [the recruiter] look like a blithering idiot", you can't start making random excuses up for Google. "It's about the culture!"

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

#449

Post by rockdoe »

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…

It's true this is probably not exactly what happened, but Google does certainly ask these questions in phone screens and the interviewers read the correct response off of a cheatsheet.

The fact that several Google people posting here literally can't believe this is true shows how fucked up their process is.

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

#450

Post by Morgawr »

ozgung wrote: post #368
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…

So you're saying Google's recruiters don't tell what position they are interviewing for and that they found a 20+ years experienced engineering manager holding patents on computer networking under-qualified for an ordinary site maintenance position. Well, that sounds like a dumb recruitment process.

This to me looks like an initial phone screening interview. It's not actually a "technical" interview (there is no code to write and the person that interviews you is a technical recruiter and not an actual engineer). As far as I know (I might be wrong so take this with a grain of salt) your first screening interview is usually used to decide in which direction you want to proceed (for example if you want to be hired as a SWE-SRE or SE-SRE position). It's not far fetched to think that they were just applying some standard questions without having an actual clear position in mind yet.

I also agree with the grandparent, I'd be very sceptical about this transcript being 100% accurate.

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