Google's “Director of Engineering” Hiring Test • Hacker News Board

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

#601

Post by gcp » Thu, Oct 13, 2016, 8:21 PM UTC

mitchty wrote: post #492

powera wrote: post #476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Popcnt isn't particularly well optimized in most micro-architectural implementations.

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

#602

Post by YZF » Thu, Oct 13, 2016, 8:22 PM UTC

probinso wrote: post #525

The problem is Google doesn't need you. Google gets onefinity applications per day. If they shave %90 percent of cold applicants this way then they will not hurt for more applicants. A company that large will gain it's best participants by reference. ----------------------------------------- my interview with google was very short. them: what is 2 ^ 37? me: can I use a calculator? them: no me: then we are done here.

You don't need a calculator for that, it's: 10000000000000000 ...

(binary obviously)

I could say pretty quickly it's somewhere around 12 billion decimal but an exact answer on paper would take me some time...

The amazing thing is that everyone thinks they're hiring the best people while it's pretty much never true. Generally speaking a place that pays well, treats people well and has challenging work will have better people than a place that doesn't and the hiring practices ability to filter beyond that are negligible.

OOPS 128 billion :)

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

#603

Post by mathattack » Thu, Oct 13, 2016, 8:22 PM UTC

This seems a bit strange. I know some senior Google folks who spend a ton of time interviewing. Could it be that these are maxed out, and that HR people are forced to do the initial screens? In that case it's best to just feed them the simplest accurate answers possible. Similar to taking the SATs.

This type of process does imply something about their recruiting funnel. HR people asking technical questions suggests they've historically passed too many technically deficient people to overworked senior engineers.

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

#604

Post by nickpsecurity » Thu, Oct 13, 2016, 8:23 PM UTC

dkonofalski wrote: post #266

nickpsecurity wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"This seems like the perfect exercise to test someone's ability to navigate those kinds of required skills." I disagree. The Q&A process isn't indicative of almost any skills on the job except patients when your time is being wasted in a formal process. He'd have to have memorized every trivial, algorithmic fact plus their textbook (not real-world!) answers with no further knowledge or answers. Such a candidate is no…

You seem to have misunderstood. The "required skills" in question are communications skills, not technical skills. This wasn't a technical interview with an engineering team member as they seemed to think. This was a personality/psychological examination to make sure that their personality and communications skills match up with the culture and personality at Google. Directors typically don't do the low-level, high-s…

Let's apply your interpretation. In this case, they are evaluating the social skills of someone who will direct projects by bright engineers. They will aldo interface with management about it. There's a lot of skills involved sith associated interviewing strategies, certifications, etc that might be employed.

Instead, the interviewer asks algorithmic questions, gets great answers, explains they're not on his sheet, and rejects the person. This is the total opposite of kind of social problems an engineering lead or project manager deals with. Plus, the requirement of keep guessing until your answer matches a sheet doesnt reflect how goals or requirements are done.

If this was assessing social or management skills, then it's the worst method I've seen to assess it. It still is a horrible result.

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

#605

Post by beamatronic » Thu, Oct 13, 2016, 8:29 PM UTC

Have any current Googlers here had an experience where they knew someone personally, could vouch for their skills, but still could not get them in, due to them not passing the interview process?

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

#606

Post by caleblloyd » Thu, Oct 13, 2016, 8:29 PM UTC

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…

I can confirm that a recruiter contacted me and asked pretty much these exact same questions when trying to recruit me for an SRE job.

My recruiter was reading these questions off of a sheet of paper, but when we had discrepancies in our answers and she would say something like "It says here an inode holds metadata", and I would respond with something like "oh, metadata and attributes are the same thing", she would say "oh, well you are correct then!"

I made it to the first phone interview but that's where the path ended. I was bummed for a little but then remembered I prefer small business anyways :)

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

#607

Post by vthallam » Thu, Oct 13, 2016, 8:29 PM UTC

spcelzrd wrote: post #317

vthallam wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know some companies do this, but this is Google. There's no incentive for them to hire H1-B's if a equally qualified American citizen is available, since they are going to pay equal salary.

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…

I have some friends on H1B who work there and also other top tech companies, trust me there's no discrimination in salary. With the extra legal fee, i think it's a burden for them to have people on temp visas.

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

#608

Post by masto » Thu, Oct 13, 2016, 8:29 PM UTC

I'm not going to go into specifics (I like my job and want to keep it), but the versions of these questions quoted in the blog, especially where the questions seem stupid and wrong, are not on accurate representation of actual SRE prescreen questions. It's possible that the recruiter somehow garbled them, or perhaps the blog's author is misremembering them after a stressful and frustrating conversation. But if you read this and think Google asks really dumb questions, I think if you saw the "real" questions, you might come away with a different opinion (especially if you understand the nature of prescreening vs. an actual interview). A hypothetical example, let's say the complaint is about the following exchange:

R: What's a potato? A: It's a vegetable that grows in the ground. R: Wrong. It's brown. A: Potatoes come in different colors, and they are vegetables that grow in the ground. R: Wrong. It says on my sheet that the correct answer is brown.

when in reality the question was "What color are Russet potatoes?" I don't know what happened here. Something, unfortunately, went off the rails.

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

#609

Post by bogomipz » Thu, Oct 13, 2016, 8:30 PM UTC

chrisper wrote: post #377

TheCapn wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The inode question gave me flashbacks to my interview with Amazon. They wanted me to explain what a hash function is. I kept giving answers for about 3 minutes explaining hashing, common algorithms, reasons to use it and places it applies. Recruiter: "I was looking for you to say it's a fingerprint " So I guess I was wrong, because despite explaining them in decent detail, I didn't use the one keyword.

I got an interview with Amazon, but failed the first round, because I did not do well on the reasoning part of the online test. You couldn't skip questions, so I spent too much time on some of them and had to rush the ones at the end. They failed me despite getting the coding part 100% right. Oh well.

Can you elaborate on what types of things you were asked to reason about in this test?

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

#610

Post by HereBeBeasties » Thu, Oct 13, 2016, 8:33 PM UTC

djsumdog wrote: post #572

optimuspaul wrote: post #510

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…

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…

I often ask the web browser one and find it quite illuminating. Best answer so far started with something like "Well, there's a microswitch in the keyboard if it's a decent one, and a circuit that debounces the input - err, is it a USB keyboard or a PS/2 one? Hmmm... How long do I have to answer this question?" THAT is the guy you want to hire...