Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google's “Director of Engineering” Hiring Test

gwan.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

591–600 of 969 posts

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

#591

Post by gcp »

intrasight wrote: post #295

The process seems geared towards hiring people right out of school since they'd have no expectation that such a candidate would be able to answer such questions. Am I right in thinking that it's easier to become a Googler by starting a company that gets acquired than by submitting to such a broken interview process?

Am I right in thinking that it's easier to become a Googler by starting a company that gets acquired than by submitting to such a broken interview process?

No, not at all. At least it used to be so that when Google acquired a company, they ran all your engineers through their interview process, and if more than half didn't make it, they stopped the acquisition and the deal was off.

The justin.tv/Twitch people blogged about how this effectively made them a billion by stopping an early acquisition until they were worth much more.

(Or at least that is what I remember reading - I can't find the article right now, so maybe it wasn't Twitch)

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

#593

Post by gcp »

landhar wrote: post #484
Tempest1981 wrote: post #80

On #9, is it 16-bit or 64-bit values? Sounds like you may have been answering a different question. Isn't the standard answer to use a 65536 entry lookup table? Edit: oh, are you reinterpreting the array of 10000 16-bit integers as 2500 64-bit integers? But then what operation do you use on each? Either way, if you find yourself arguing with the recruiter, it's probably a bad sign.

I thought the reason it was generally accepted that the 8-bit lookup table is optimal is because it can fit in the L1 cache.

(Very) embedded developer speaking here. What's this L1 cache you speak of?

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

#594

Post by zzzcpan »

wffurr wrote: post #512
johndubchak wrote: post #485

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Not being able to answer even a simple coding question with for-loops is a really bad sign, even if the question is "beneath" the candidate's level. I'd expect any technical candidate to be able to do at least a fizzbuzz-type question.

Now take into account stress, lack of preparation, environment the person is not used to, unusual syntax patterns for them, biases against them, their way of talking, their appearance, etc. and you get yourself people good at your kinds of interviews in your biased view. You can only hope they are at least average at their job.

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

#595

Post by ionwake »

aetherson wrote: post #127
gberger wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But what if Google is down and you are tasked with diagnosing it?

If they are trying to hire for a position that will somehow be on the line for what happens when all of Google is down , I for real hope that they get some higher-power questions into that interview. But, obvs, the answer is that you Bing it.

This is the funniest thread I've ever seen on HN

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

#597

Post by krzyk »

djsumdog wrote: post #555
_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…

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…

Why it is important to know the difference between statically and dynamically typed languages? If one writes in only one of those (or one set) it is not important to him/her and doesn't specifically make him/her a worse programmer in that particular language.

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

#598

Post by exDM69 »

optimuspaul wrote: post #510
johndubchak wrote: post #485

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…

My company has been giving the fizzbuzz for students applying for internship, with any language they wish and extra for style points.

The results speak for themself. All the good applicants do it in no time, without hesitation and give a perfect answer and usually some style points on top. The ones who have second grade coding skills have always something wrong with it.

It's a good 5 minute test whether someone can code or not. It shouldn't be the only test, of course.

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

#599

Post by zwischenzug »

kajecounterhack wrote: post #440
rockdoe wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Thanks, I am realizing now that it was SRE. All I can say is I'm definitely a fan of how we interview SWEs and I'm sorta bummed this is how SRE interviews go. TIL.

I got these questions when being interviewed for SWE and SRE. My answers suggested to the interviewer that I should go down the SRE route. I passed in the end, because I felt the culture regarded everything as a technical problem (which has worked out for them so far) and Google was a company where you did things their way, and don't rock the boat.

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

#600

Post by diakritikal »

mirekrusin wrote: post #393
lordnacho wrote: post #13

I'm amazed he knew things in such detail. I mean who would know just how long a MAC address is? Or what the actual SYN/ACK etc tcp flags are? You just need to know what they're used for, and if you need the specifics, you'll find out with a single search. He seemed to know that as well though. Kernighan for bit twiddling algos, that kind of thing. It's a bit strange to have someone non-technical interviewing a techie…

He's one of the best programmers you can get (in the world) when it comes to networking and friends. Gwan is less known around because it's not OSS but I believe still achieves unmatched performance. This interview must be some kind of a mistake. It's like testing Richard Feynman's knowledge with questions about multiplication table (where you have wrong answers on your table). It's so stupid that it's almost not pos…

>Gwan is less known around because it's not OSS but I believe still achieves unmatched performance.

ERR_CONNECTION_REFUSED

Post reply on HN