Live data from Hacker News

Google's “Director of Engineering” Hiring Test

gwan.com

571–580 of 969 posts

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

#571
post #541

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At what point do we start taking reports like these seriously My guess is when the number of applications per position actually drops far enough that the false negative rate starts to hurt. Until then, an interview processed optimized for avoiding false positives at all costs will persist. Totally makes sense for a company worth hundreds of billions though, can you imagine if they had a few more bad hires sneak in?…

It happens all the time Google acquires a new company, those employees aren't going through these crazy interview processes.

actually, acquisitions normally trigger full interviews- see "Chaos Monkeys" for a description how this happened at Twitter/Facebook.

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

#572

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I agree. Why the hell would you ask someone at that level basic questions like fizz buzz? It's absurd. I also tend to shy away from asking coding questions in interviews, they don't tell me much about aptitude for critical thinking and culture fit. Skills can be taught but culture is much harder. ... But I'm not saying to throw in some questions that don't prove that they are actually competent, just be casual about…

I think coding questions are really important. You see their logic flow. Now stupid coding questions (in a list, find all the number pairs that add up to another number in the list) are terrible. They're complex and even good programmers need time to think about them. Fibonacci is one that people expect, so they look up all the variations and you get people who are good test takers (would ace a GRE/MCAT) but not good designers.

You want a simple question that isn't common, but that shows how they break down a problem under stress. Example: you have an input with paragraphs at 80 characters. Write a function to return the same paragraphs wrapped to 40 characters. You cannot break a word and must maintain paragraphs.

Great design questions: a word problem (You have an autoshop with, staff and customers. Customers can own multiple cars. A staff member gets assigned to a car with a work order...) .. draw an ER diagram. This is actually a pretty low stress question. It should be straight forward. If someone draws a terrible ER diagram with lists in tables and no normalization, or unnecessary relationships (or you have to keep asking them to label 1-to-n/n-to-1 relationships and they struggle), you know they're not going to be good at designing database schemas.

Another great general knowledge question: "A user types in a web address into a web browser and hits enter. Describe what happens. Go into as much detail as you can." This gives people a change to elaborate as much as they can. People can talk about DNS, HTTP, load balances, HTTP request/response, cookies, load balancers, web apps vs static content...

Questions need to be geared to the job. You don't ask someone to draw an ER diagram if they're being hired to rack servers and setup VMWare. Likewise you don't ask a web developer to write a function to do matrix multiplication.

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

#573
post #544

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. Why the hell would you ask someone at that level basic questions like fizz buzz? It's absurd. I also tend to shy away from asking coding questions in interviews, they don't tell me much about aptitude for critical thinking and culture fit. Skills can be taught but culture is much harder. ... But I'm not saying to throw in some questions that don't prove that they are actually competent, just be casual about…

> Why the hell would you ask someone at that level basic questions like fizz buzz? Because there are people applying for software engineering jobs that still can't answer those questions.

If you have a CS degree and cannot answer this type of question in your language of choice, you simply aren't ready for even a junior position in my opinion.

This type of coding exercise can potentially answer more questions about the candidate in two minutes than 30 minutes of softball questions about the candidate's past experiences.

I think that people who disagree simply haven't done much interviewing or haven't worked on a team with someone who couldn't do much more than copy/paste code from SO.

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

#574
post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They don't have to offer the same salary, just salary in the same range. That range can be pretty wide ($20k+) Employees on an H1-B visa have drastically less job mobility than US Citizens. This creates a power advantage for the employer. >but this is Google Google has, in the past, illegally conspired to prevent other companies from recruiting their employees. This lowers wages and reduces employee mobility. Clearly…

> Employees on an H1-B visa have drastically less job mobility than US Citizens. This creates a power advantage for the employer. Yet Google pays the lawyers needed to get you a Green Card as fast as possible.

Its not that simple. There are quotas by country. For someone with a let's say Bachelors or even Masters degree from certain countries, just money wont get them GC soon. The wait time is several years AFAIK.

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

#575
post #438
post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> they found a 20+ years experienced engineering manager holding patents on computer networking under-qualified for an ordinary site maintenance position. To be fair, I've interviewed people at previous companies that had patents and 15 years at IBM on their CV and completely failed even the most basic system / coding questions. (fizzbuzz style). There are a lot of people that read great on the CV but then it turns o…

> completely failed even the most basic system / coding questions.

But could they at least tell you why quick sort was the best sorting algorithm?

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

#576
post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They don't have to offer the same salary, just salary in the same range. That range can be pretty wide ($20k+) Employees on an H1-B visa have drastically less job mobility than US Citizens. This creates a power advantage for the employer. >but this is Google Google has, in the past, illegally conspired to prevent other companies from recruiting their employees. This lowers wages and reduces employee mobility. Clearly…

> Employees on an H1-B visa have drastically less job mobility than US Citizens. This creates a power advantage for the employer. Yet Google pays the lawyers needed to get you a Green Card as fast as possible.

Yet a Green Card does not give an employee anywhere near the same level of job mobility as a US Citizen.

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

#577
post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You proved P = NP??? In a little more than 45 mins or did you misunderstand the question?

If I were asked that question, my answer would be that obviously P != NP because the former doesn't have an N at the front. The pain of being tossed out onto the pavement would totally be worth it.

might get you bonus points. It's a clever answer.

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

#578
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…

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?" "W…

I believe 90% of my coworkers and former coworkers would be unable to answer the HTTP response question.

And 95% haven't used netcat or wireshark. I wouldn't have either, if it wasn't for some particular work related to messaging.

They're able to develop reasonable line of business websites in spite of that.

I would be extremely worried if they were unable to answer about the difference between GET or POST, or the difference between statically and dynamically typed languages, so I agree with those.

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

#579
post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference is memory management, completely different. Don't ask me for a function that "Returns" something in a technical interview and when I call you out on it say I'm wrong, when I'm not. It's a technical interview, the question should have been technically correct. "What function passes by-reference copies of inodes?"

My worst offense of this was for a linux admin position when asked from another abmin about how to list connections on a machine. My answer was "lsof -i, since I've found it's easiest to pull granular information." "lsof just prints open files... you would use netstat, not lsof." I tried correcting him, but he wouldn't listen and ended the call soon after. I never received a call back.

Most people don't know that lsof works into two modes- the typical one is to run it against a process ID. The rarer one is no args, which runs it against everything on the system. however, I observe that lsof needs to run as root to print the same information that netstat -tanp returns for a reglar user.

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

#580
post #78

Without actually hearing the transcript verbatim, it's hard to give much enlightened perspective here, but there's a lot of "hur hur, dumb recruiter" responses here. What I will say, in general, is that figuring out what the "right" answers are here for what is obviously a technical phone screen by a non-technical person with answers on a piece of paper is also part of the challenge. This is a Director of Engineering…

But most of these answers weren't even "technically right", or even dickish; they were pretty simple and straightforward answers. For instance, the recruiter asks what's the KILL signal, and then says the right answer is SIGTERM. If the answer itself is wrong, then what can you do?

Not sure where you're getting this "be a dick" routine thing from, but when I read through the transcript, it was clear that the recruiter was looking for an excuse to reject the author, and nothing else.

Post reply on HN