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Google's “Director of Engineering” Hiring Test

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

#551

Post by dekhn »

meshko wrote: post #505
potatolicious wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I got rejected just this month and I can certify that there was no crazy bullshit in the process. I mean, I feel like you made a mistake rejecting me, but I also can imagine a valid process behind the scenes which would reject me based on my "ok but not great" performance. I do hear anecdotes from people I trust which sound crappy (being asked very specific technical questions on subjects that candidate doesn't have…

Google turned me down a couple times before I got hired. The first two were definite mistakes (false negatives) where I should have been hired. Just treat it like a process to be optimized. You can reapply every 18 months.

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

#552

Post by weaksauce »

zeppelin101 wrote: post #533
_t0du wrote: post #520

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, general interviewing (unrelated to tech) contains various amounts of "are you lying on your resume" type questions. If someone walks in with a breakdown of 10 years dev, 5 years management, they should be able to at least comfortably answer system/coding type questions. As in, if you do something every day for 10 years, you don't forget all of it in 5. I had a candidate in a few months ago that was interviewing…

How can you not know what MVC stands for? It's pretty much a buzzword!

I mean, yeah, 99% of candidates should know what that means because it is an extremely common initialism. Although, I could see some engineer who worked on networking drivers for 10 years might not be up to date on the design patterns of frontend engineering.

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

#553

Post by DannyBee »

JimboOmega wrote: post #543
DannyBee wrote: post #532

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When was this? This was the case when i started (~2006), but it definitely changed and is not the case anymore.

Probably late 2000s when I was last on site. Google bugs me every year (most recently a week or two ago), but I don't usually push on the process.

Interesting. I could look up the date it changed, but it definitely changed because folks didn't like the old way :P.

Now, instead, they generally don't recruit (google is too large to not have exceptions) without some specific hiring managers and headcount in mind.

They will tell you what those groups are and what they do. So for example, the person i interviewed last week was targeted at two teams. I actually specifically asked if he knew what he was being interviewed for, because i like to get some idea what the candidate thinks whatever job they are interviewing for means, and he was able to tell me the two groups and knew what they did.

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

#555

Post by djsumdog »

_t0du wrote: post #520
johndubchak wrote: post #485

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps that suggests you're giving them the wrong interview.

Well, general interviewing (unrelated to tech) contains various amounts of "are you lying on your resume" type questions. If someone walks in with a breakdown of 10 years dev, 5 years management, they should be able to at least comfortably answer system/coding type questions. As in, if you do something every day for 10 years, you don't forget all of it in 5. I had a candidate in a few months ago that was interviewing…

My kick-out questions:

"Could you write out what an HTTP request and response looks like on the board?"

I'm really surprised at how many people can't do this. If you've spent five years developing web, surely you've had to look at raw requests, either debugging using netcat or with wireshark or just looking at the information in the Chrome/Firefox debugger?

"What's the difference between a GET and a POST request?"

"What is the difference between a statically typed and a dynamically typed language?"

I had one candidate try to tell me Java was dynamically typed and Scala was statically typed. It was for a Scala position. They also said "statistically typed" instead of statically, even after I corrected them.

-_-

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

#556

Post by dekhn »

lucb1e wrote: post #472
dekhn wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

it's worth reading and understanding the ideas behind LSH and hamming distance. there are some... fundamental mathematical relationshps there that are still being ... hashed out.

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

#557

Post by falcolas »

DannyBee wrote: post #547
falcolas wrote: post #527

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> SRE is not an ordinary site maintenance position by any means Then why ask about the nitty gritty details required by maintenance personnel as part of the screening process - things I would rather have my high level employees looking up rather than relying on a possibly faulty memory. > Judging an entire recruitment process based on one side of a story from a person who's clearly upset about an interview, and 3 sen…

"Then why ask about the nitty gritty details required by maintenance personnel as part of the screening process - things I would rather have my high level employees looking up rather than relying on a possibly faulty memory. " This is one reason why i find it super-strange. It's not a set of "high level employee" questions. It's a standard SRE pre-screening. "How about the responses from your own employees which are…

> It's a standard SRE pre-screening.

To clarify, I was speaking of your standard SRE hires, whose position you referred to as "not maintenance drones".

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

#559

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

ivanhoe wrote: post #342
segmondy wrote: post #56

Earlier 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…

The amazing part here is that so many people still remembers all those little details. I still know how it works, but honestly I forgot all the details long time ago.

A lot of it depends on what you do day to day. A year ago, I knew what a MAC address was, but in an abstract way. Today I automatically know it's 6 bytes long because I look at them every day.

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

#560

Post by gcp »

greyman wrote: post #371

I once coded chess playing algorithm for fun, and can confirm that the recruiter was correct on #9: you count bits by using a lookup table and then sum the results. It's the quickest way. But I am not sure if this is possible to figure out immediately without such experience...

Ah, the appeal to authority.

It depends, but generally speaking, you are wrong and OP is right that you'd want to benchmark on the actual architecture.

a) First of all, you're probably basing your answer off of experience with 64-bit popcounts. But note the question was about popcounting multiple 16-bit words, not single 64-bit words. This isn't typically what you do in a chessprogram. b) The table has a cache footprint and can be pushed out of L1, which kills that approach in many real programs. c) Modern CPUs have a POPCOUNT instruction. It's slow and limited to one port on most Intel machines, though, so not necessarily always a win either. d) Lacking POPCOUNT, and with cache pressure, the SWAR approaches are good, especially if you can compute multiple results at once. With AVX2 it becomes especially interesting. f) If the the expectation is that many of the numbers are zero, a simple loop will win.

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