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Google's “Director of Engineering” Hiring Test

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

#491

Post by mayoff »

mox1 wrote: post #84
tptacek wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I knew all these answers too, because I was a developer in the 1990s. There is absolutely no purpose to knowing off the top of your head how long an ethernet address is, or even what system call will retrieve an inode (his bickering over stat() "filling in" rather than "returning" was bogus, for what it's worth). The top Google search result for each of these questions has the answer. Knowing these things isn't part…

The question was what function "returns" an inode. Those functions return a error code, you pass in a stat structure and the function populates that structure. He was saying (correctly), that they don't return (in the classic C sense) the inode. They return an error code. To me that is a big difference... int lstat(const char path, struct stat buf); vs stat* lstat(const char *path); 2 completely different functions.

Here's the first sentence of the DESCRIPTION section of the stat(2) man page on my Linux systems:

    These functions return information about a file.

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

#492

Post by mitchty »

powera wrote: post #476
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.

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.

Honestly I would have said popcnt as well. Lookup table or bit shifts when I can have the cpu count the 1's? I guess i'd need to benchmark it to be sure. Either way I can't say its a good question.

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

#494

Post by rockdoe »

user5994461 wrote: post #463
rockdoe wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The people doing these interviews are non-technical people who read off of a cheatsheet. The cheatsheet covers alternative answers, but a situation like the OP describes can never end well.

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

#495

Post by zerkten »

mirekrusin wrote: post #420
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…

It's an interesting recruitment setup where overqualified candidates are rejected.

You can have situations where you are prepared to recruit someone with potential versus being the final article. In those situations the overqualified candidates may not compare well with what you consider the potential of the slightly under-qualified candidate, and may not have some of their other attributes. It's obviously a risk, but it happens more than people think.

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

#497

Post by DannyBee »

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.

First, it is definitely standard process to tell him (if they didn't, that's a definite failure). Again, remember you only have one side of the story here.

I like to try to gather facts before assuming things. IE Ready, aim, fire, not fire, ready, aim.

Admittedly more difficult in this case (and certainly, i have no access to it)

Second i'm going to point out a few things:

Experience may translate into wisdom, it may not. Plenty of companies promote people just because they last long enough. So 20 years experience managing may translate into a high level manager, it may not!

I hold a bunch of patents too on compilers and other things, it's not indicative of much in terms of skill, because almost anything is patentable.

Lastly, SRE is not an ordinary site maintenance position by any means. I"m not even sure where to begin to correct that. I guess i'd start here: https://landing.google.com/sre/interview/ben-treynor.html

Does this mean this person is under/overqualified/exactly right? I literally have no idea. I just don't think it's as obvious one way or the other.

"Well, that sounds like a dumb recruitment process."

Judging an entire recruitment process based on one side of a story from a person who's clearly upset about an interview, and even 3 sentences i wrote on hacker news, seems ... silly.

If you want to do it, okay.

But everyone in this entire thread seems to be making snap judgements without a lot of critical thinking. That makes me believe a lot of people here have a ton of pre-existing biases they are projecting onto this in one direction or the other (and you are, of course, welcome to claim i fall into this category too!)

I almost didn't jump into this discussion because it seems so polarized and rash compared to a lot of others

I think i'm just going to leave it alone because it's not clear to me the discussion is going to get any more reasonable.

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

#498

Post by hasch »

kabdib wrote: post #480
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 :-)

I think in this case, it's more like there are "independent" recruiters with their fixed Q&A sheets sitting around, somewhere, and fishing around for possible candidates to make it to a second level.

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

#500

Post by DannyBee »

jnbiche wrote: post #254
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…

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…

"What exactly is super strange? "

Sure. For starters:

1. This guy apparently did not know he was interviewing for an SRE position.

2. The recruiter was looking for very very specific answers and immediately rejected any others.

3. There was no other discussion of anything, at all.

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