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

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

#631

Post by solipsism » Thu, Oct 13, 2016, 9:03 PM UTC

potatolicious wrote: post #430

odbol_ wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with Google's interview methods is that they all select for a very specific type of programmer: heavily math oriented, deep knowledge of obscure Computer Science theory, but not one test on knowledge of languages, architecture, design, or actual real-world problem solving. I walked into an interview with one guy and he literally did not even say hello: he just jumped straight into some problem I had to so…

> "The problem with Google's interview methods is that they all select for a very specific type of programmer: heavily math oriented, deep knowledge of obscure Computer Science theory" I'd be marginally okay with it if the interviews actually selected for this sort of engineer! I've seen multiple people who fit this description to a T who flunked the process, hard. If the goal here is "pick the hyper-mathy, deep-CS t…

Having a high degree of false negatives doesn't mean the positive signal isn't reliable.

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

#632

Post by ghufran_syed » Thu, Oct 13, 2016, 9:03 PM UTC

raverbashing wrote: post #565

kyrra wrote: post #546

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google questions a lot of what it does. It's made up of lots of engineers and other that are on this site and care deeply about the fields we are in. We are always questioning decisions made and try to use data as best as we can to back up those decision. As for customer support, it depends on the product you are talking about. Your free gmail account or $5 purchases through the play store: don't expect a lot of supp…

I am aware of these support channels, but there are a lot of stories of paying customers getting stonewalled. Not to mention cases where non-paying customers or content producers get simply kicked out without recourse - though sometimes Google (and others) are right to act in a certain way

I used to have project fi, their customer support was quick and helpful, even for complicated things like when the porting out of my number got stuck (not their fault, it was the other carrier)

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

#633

Post by smnscu » Thu, Oct 13, 2016, 9:07 PM UTC

Animats wrote: post #388

Is this for real? Does Google really hire interviewers that stupid? The list of questions is really dated. They're all pre-1990. The answers are dated, too. A Linux inode is the file system's representation of the base info of a file, from which the file's data blocks can be found. It also carries file metadata, but its real function is as the root of the file's block index tree. The format depends on the file system…

As many people here have already commented, these are some screening questions asked in the first informal chat with a recruiter. I got the same questions this week, but they were presented as a warmup, which I now realise might have been disingenuous. Thank you for the detailed answers, though – as always, your comments are extremely interesting and informative.

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

#634

Post by pjmlp » Thu, Oct 13, 2016, 9:07 PM UTC

dekhn wrote: post #571

pjmlp wrote: post #541

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is this an US thing?

I went through three acquisitions and never had any interview, besides the set of meetings for each of us to decide to go along with the acquisition or get a severance package.

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

#635

Post by monocasa » Thu, Oct 13, 2016, 9:09 PM UTC

gcp wrote: post #612

monocasa wrote: post #531

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. Went and tried the lookup method against a 5 step parallel shift and add method (which is the fastest bitwise way I know of without, and the lookup is ~5% faster than the bitwise way. https://gist.github.com/monocasa/1d44a03cbd0170bfffc6a4a5c37...

Your code has 6 shifts, 6 adds/subs and 6 ANDs. You can do it with 4 shifts, 3 adds, 1 MUL and 4 ANDs. Your code is simply suboptimal.

For a 64bit quantity? I'm curious to see your algorithm in actual code.

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

#636

Post by viraptor » Thu, Oct 13, 2016, 9:09 PM UTC

delphinius81 wrote: post #624

ctdonath wrote: post #562

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not all programming/engineering circles use the same buzzwords. For five years my mobile development groups used the concept without the acronym.

Agreed. I interviewed a few QA candidates at a previous company that used a term completely differently than we did. When I rephrased the question from defining the term to "what kind of test would you run in this situation" I got the kind of answers I would expect. It's far more important that a candidate understands the concepts needed to solve a problem, than that they have memorized a term. Hell, someone could be…

Even then it's worth remembering not every MVC is the same. Fat/slim models. Intelligent/simple views. There's lots of approaches to even a well known paradigm.

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

#637

Post by glandium » Thu, Oct 13, 2016, 9:09 PM UTC

clifanatic wrote: post #291

eternalban wrote: post #107

I would agree with "metadata" answer being correct. "Each inode stores the attributes and disk block location(s) of the filesystem object's data." [1] A file's "attributes" are independent of its storage. One could also argue the notion that a FS object's ACL are attributes of the file. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inode

Except that anybody who actually does understand what an inode is and what it's for would say exactly what OP said.

No, because OP is describing an inode number, not an inode.

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

#638

Post by bogomipz » Thu, Oct 13, 2016, 9:11 PM UTC

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.

Are SWE and SRE interview the same? I thought they were different enough job descriptions that it would require different interview questions.

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

#639

Post by urda » Thu, Oct 13, 2016, 9:13 PM UTC

eco wrote: post #145

Frankly, this reads like a post from /r/ThatHappened. For those unfamiliar, it's a subreddit to share social media posts from people telling obviously made up stories with the purpose of making themselves look good (e.g., brave student stands up to intolerant teacher, receives standing ovation from peers). The interview may have happened and the questions may be accurate but the story is very exaggerated to make the…

This definitely fails a basic "smell test", I don't think the author has the most honest intentions at all.

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

#640

Post by fatihky » Thu, Oct 13, 2016, 9:14 PM UTC

dewiz wrote: post #159

if this is Pierre, I remember some controversial discussions years back. Some links: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4113514 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4109698 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8130849

I am not him, if you ask this.