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Google's “Director of Engineering” Hiring Test

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

#471

Post by dylanfw »

btilly wrote: post #338
geofft wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reading more closely, it sounds like they are not interviewing him for a director of engineering position; it just sounds like he thinks his current role, CEO-who-writes-code of a very small software company ( http://www.gwan.com/about ), qualifies him for a director-of-engineering-level position. He's probably being interviewed for an SRE team lead or thereabouts. Why he's being interviewed for that position is a di…

How can you imagine Google being totally right here? The disconnect between the questions being asked and the interviewer's lack of knowledge made the interview a waste of time no matter WHAT role they are interviewing for. Take, for example, the sorting question. "Why is QuickSort the best sorting algorithm?" The answer being looked for was, "It has the best Big O." And this is wrong. Its average case is O(n log(n))…

> Its average case is O(n log(n)). Its worst case is O(n^2). Which do you call its big-O?

I know this is irrelevant to the larger point of your post, and I'm sure that you know this already, but the worst case is the big-O. This is just another reason why "big-O" is not the most helpful thing to discuss in practice.

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

#472

Post by lucb1e »

dekhn wrote: post #253
lucb1e wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know some hash functions are not meant to create unique fingerprints (they're to pick a bucket to put/look in), but what do you mean by the opposite of a fingerprint?

The goal of a fingerprint hash is to convert an input space of "large" values to an output space where the output space values are much shorter- typically fixed size and two similar input values have effectively random outputs (without spending the CPU cycles to implement a cryptographic hash). This permits a wide range of optimizations (a document can be fingerprinted, and looked up by its fingerprint, to see if it'…

Thanks for the elaborate answer! I knew about things like acoustic fingerprints but not that people use the term "hash function" to describe something that indicates similarity.

Could something like Hamming distance be called a hash function too? It's not mentioned on its Wikipedia page.

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

#473

Post by mankash666 »

mooreds wrote: post #209
mankash666 wrote: post #74

"Recruiter: wrong, it's SYN, SYN-ACK and ACK; if Google is down you will need to know this to diagnose what the problem is. We will stop here because it's obvious that you don't have the necessary skills to write or review network applications. " Because when Google is down, it's typically upper management that fixes network issues. CEO level to directors of engineering are on pager duty most nights there.

May I assume this is tongue in cheek?

Absolutely not. The reason so many Google upper management types sport beards (case in point, Sundar Pichai), is the chronic lack of time from working nights as data-center technicians/network engineers. How else can you explain Google's up-time and low-latency? :)

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

#474

Post by ransom1538 »

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…

These are not director questions. I wonder if this is a case where a team didn't want to hire:

A team gets pressure to hire, but they don't want to.

A team has a great internal candidate but can't push it through without going through external candidates. (Expecting any director couldn't answer these -- which they shouldn't).

A team can get 2 for 1. Usually an H1B situation, which has the extra benefit of chaining the 2 candidates to the company. Former H1B employees love this option.

A team has a 'friend' in mind.

I honestly think, this isn't a question of a dumb recruiter, more like a way to just push something through. The recruiter was probably taken to lunch with a high five. This is very normal. I wouldn't freakout that they have a 'dumb process' you need to read between the lines here. The saddest part, this pawn gets a "PASSED" on his record at Google -- but it was just internal politics.

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

#475

Post by tgokh »

baby wrote: post #455
rayiner wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

just prepend "cache://" to the url

Woah, I've never seen this before -- thanks for sharing!

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

#476

Post by powera »

rayiner wrote: post #416
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…

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.

The question was "how do you do bit-counting of a bunch of numbers". The two canonical answers are "lookup table" and "using bit shifts and multiplying by magic numbers".

The fact that there's a machine instruction for it does makes it a bad question.

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

#478

Post by bostik »

ksec wrote: post #187
JorgeGT wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A brilliant professor of mine liked to say "The Answer of the Engineer: it depends".

That is nearly the answer i give to every questions. But when i asked for more detail no one likes it. They all simply want "answers". Well much like most things in life, there is no such thing as concrete answer.

I keep pushing the message that getting a "correct[tm]" answer to a technical question is probably not the answer you should be looking for. Problem solving skill trumps rote knowledge every time.

I recently wrote a somewhat lengthy post on the subject, after realising how bad some companies are at this: https://smarketshq.com/notes-on-interviewing-engineers-a4fa4...

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

#479

Post by danharaj »

noploop wrote: post #334
danharaj wrote: post #60

Mediocre people can't evaluate exceptional people. What mediocre people think is knowledgeable can't be exceptional knowledge, by definition. If you want to find exceptional directors of engineering, you need an exceptional person worthy of being director of engineering to evaluate them. In seeking victory, not going beyond what everyone knows / is not skilled. Victory in battle that all-under-heaven calls skilled /…

Bullshit. If Pierre was actually smart he would be able to judge the level of the interviewer and give the answers required. And if he had any self confidence at all he wouldn't have the need to boast about this on his blog.

I... disagree? Like? The questions were OK questions, it was the answers that were asinine and clearly not meant to gauge anything except the ability to skim wikipedia pages about computer science.

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

#480

Post by kabdib »

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…

Wow. If this is actually what happens, even a little bit, then Google has a huge, huge fucking problem, and it needs to be fixed.

I've never bothered to apply to Google. But if this happened to me, I'd just walk away. You don't know me, but you don't want that :-)

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