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Google's “Director of Engineering” Hiring Test

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

#461

Post by AlexCoventry »

jazzyk wrote: post #381
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 have been in similar roles (Software Architect , CTO) where I had to explain to non-technical, but impatient (or pissed off) people (CEO, VCs) technical concepts and judgement calls. But I knew in advance they were not technical. Also, a CEO would not challenge my explanation of what algorithm to use for sorting, be real :-)

You can know the technical level of your audience and adjust your explanations accordingly, yet still completely fail to achieve your intended result because your focus on what you want has blinded you to your misunderstanding of what they want.

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

#462

Post by rockdoe »

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).

You unintentionally screw with the timing? (I had the same happen)

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

#463

Post by user5994461 »

rockdoe wrote: post #426
kajecounterhack wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(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 repo…

You should be ashamed then, because these are definitely the questions used on SRE phone screens.

The questions are fine for SRE. The problem is the behaviour and the expectations of the interviewer.

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

#464

Post by Morgawr »

sfrailsdev wrote: post #392
joesmo wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup, those are SRE questions, but the fact that Google didn't interview him for the position he applied for makes them out to be even bigger idiots than I had them pegged at for using SRE questions on a director role. Regardless, just having such a stupid process exposed reflects badly on Google. In my own experience, Google isn't even able to call at the scheduled time so, while not the worst interviewers ever, they…

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 blatantly false.

Source: I work for Google. Our daily schedule is packed with meetings and we try to be as on time as possible, interviews (which are something that everybody should be doing) work exactly the same, we don't try to screw people over with bad timing just to "test" them. Sometimes it happens that people miss interviews and somebody else has to show up, this is unfortunately a problem and it shouldn't happen but sometimes it does (accidents and unforeseen things happen). It's not done on purpose.

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

#465

Post by yarou »

Just a general comment, again anecdotal. There seems to be a trend of recruiters performing bait-and-switch in SV currently.

For example, you may be hired for a technical role, but you end up doing manual work or bash script maintenance.

Another tactic (this one is pretty hilarious) is that hiring managers will continuously interview new people for the same job description, without any intention of hiring them, in order to keep the slot open. Sad, but true.

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

#466

Post by powera »

spott wrote: post #439
powera wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Who's answer is wrong? Cause no-one suggested a 16bit lookup table. His answer was to look at 64 bits at a time and do a [0] Kernighan style count. The "correct" answer was an 8-bit lookup table. Which is right is going to be highly dependent on the data and the architecture you are using. [0] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12380478/bits-counting-al...

You're correct, I misread what he said the recruiter's answer was.

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

#467

Post by rockdoe »

sidazad wrote: post #200
SomeCallMeTim wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've had questions that drilled down into what bytes are in a TCP/IP packet on an interview. If you say you know about TCP/IP on a resume, it's fair game. FWIW I got all the bytes but the checksum; apparently no one ever remembers the checksum byte. :) What's completely wrong with the situation is that the recruiter was saying "wrong" when he was giving detailed answers. The right solution is to have a non-skilled re…

The right solution is to have a technical person conduct this test.

This costs money. As long as Google receives plenty of acceptable candidates, false negatives are free.

(Assuming they get no false positives, which, thinking about it, is a big assumption)

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

#469

Post by redog »

anuj_nm wrote: post #252
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 was asked pretty much the same questions for an SRE position at Google. Note that I only found the recruiter phone screen to be this kind of 'pop quiz'. The engineering interviews were more detailed discussions with engineers.

About 8 years ago I had the same questions.

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

#470

Post by bvinc »

dekhn wrote: post #101
sonoffett wrote: post #64

quicksort is O(n^2) which is definitely not the "best big-O" for sorting.

quicksort is O(nlogn) average case, and O(n 2) on already sorted arrays.

Just a nitpick: There are versions of quicksort that perform well, O(n*log n), on already sorted data. But there is always some worst case scenario where it can be O(n^2).
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