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

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

#651

Post by DannyBee » Thu, Oct 13, 2016, 9:35 PM UTC

falsedan wrote: post #569

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…

This looks like a typical pre-interview recruiter phone screen… they're looking for shibboleths that identify the candidate as a genuine computer person who took CS 101, and exclude candidates who spam every job with bogus CVs. I'd start every candidate with this screen, unless I personally knew them & was familiar with their technical ability. > none of these are on or related to the "director of engineering" interv…

"They'd be internal to recruiting, so you wouldn't see them unless you were heavily involved (doing interviews and recruiting trips isn't being heavily involved)."

Actually, this is a super-bad assumption, pre-screening questions, etc, are all public to google internally. There are no magic internal-to-recruiting parts to the questions, and they are in fact, listed as SRE pre-screening questions, so ...

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

#652

Post by zem » Thu, Oct 13, 2016, 9:37 PM UTC

chrismorgan wrote: post #131

ryandrake wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are the components that make up a color? "Well, it depends what color model you are using, which differentiates between additive and subtractive color mixing, the medium used (print, screen, etc.)... No. It's Red, Green, and Blue.

But hang on, the primary colours are red, yellow and blue! I know, they told me so in primary school.

wow, there's an entire school just to teach that? (:

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

#653

Post by yandrypozo » Thu, Oct 13, 2016, 9:39 PM UTC

This is the best example of one unintentional DoS attack, now I cannot read it anymore :(

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

#654

Post by SomeCallMeTim » Thu, Oct 13, 2016, 9:42 PM UTC

sidazad wrote: post #200

SomeCallMeTim wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've had questions that drilled down into what bytes are in a TCP/IP packet on an interview. If you say you know about TCP/IP on a resume, it's fair game. FWIW I got all the bytes but the checksum; apparently no one ever remembers the checksum byte. :) What's completely wrong with the situation is that the recruiter was saying "wrong" when he was giving detailed answers. The right solution is to have a non-skilled re…

The right solution is to have a technical person conduct this test.

My presumption was that, for whatever reason, they couldn't or wouldn't do screening at this level by technical interviewers. Obviously having a technical person do the interview is always better.

I may have gotten a technical interviewer because I can list a half dozen people who know me who work at Google, most of whom can directly vouch for me.

Not sure why the OP got an unskilled reviewer, but if they didn't list references inside the company, they may have been thrown in the "random unknown applicant" bucket.

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

#655

Post by thaumasiotes » Thu, Oct 13, 2016, 9:43 PM UTC

kerneis wrote: post #583

Morgawr wrote: post #450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This to me looks like an initial phone screening interview. It's not actually a "technical" interview (there is no code to write and the person that interviews you is a technical recruiter and not an actual engineer). As far as I know (I might be wrong so take this with a grain of salt) your first screening interview is usually used to decide in which direction you want to proceed (for example if you want to be hired…

This. I passed several rounds of interviews at Google over a number of years (phone screening, phone interview, on-site). This is definitely a phone screening, where the recruiter expects "standard" answers to "standard" questions. Remember that interviews are somewhat of a game. Trying to be smart at this stage is the wrong move.

> This is definitely a phone screening, where the recruiter expects "standard" answers to "standard" questions.

I went through a Google phone screen once. (For full disclosure, I've interviewed on-site twice and failed that both times.)

One problem posed on the phone screen involved finding the last 1 in an infinite array consisting of a finite number of 1s followed by an infinite number of 0s. I described the search strategy "check index 0/1/2, then progressively square the index until a 0 is found, then use binary search to find the first 0". The screener objected to that strategy on the grounds that successive squaring "grew too fast" and successively doubling the index would be faster overall.

Once the call concluded, I looked into it and determined that those two strategies are almost exactly equivalent. This didn't leave me impressed with the phone screen process.

Then again, I apparently passed the screen despite making that "mistake". Still, I think the least courtesy you can extend to interviewees is to not correct them when they're right and you're wrong. :/

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

#656

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Oct 13, 2016, 9:44 PM UTC

_Marak_ wrote: post #584

The Google interview process is a disaster. Incompetent HR is apparently the norm. When I finally got to my ( 8th? ) interview there, I was asked by a very senior manager whether or not I had ever used Github before. Considering Google cold contacted me based on the specific email address and projects I make available on my Github profile, it was kinda was confusing. Ohh yeah, he also asked me what CSS stood for. I e…

[deleted]

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

#657

Post by monocasa » Thu, Oct 13, 2016, 9:45 PM UTC

dkonofalski wrote: post #206

AlexCoventry wrote: post #166

Isn't a Director of Engineering meant to be an interface between engineers and the rest of the organization? Perhaps this was more like a smoke test for the political insight such a role calls for, not the ostensible test of technical skill it was presented as. After the first couple of wrong answers, people with the right social skills to manage others and represent their interests to the broader organization would…

I think this is exactly what they're looking for and what half of the people in this thread are missing. Someone else mentioned that they also had this interview and remembered these questions and that the person doing the interview told them he was a psychologist. Why would they be doing a technical interview with a psychologist? This was a skills interview for sure but it wasn't the skills that most of these people…

> Why would they be doing a technical interview with a psychologist?

Because every psychology major I knew from college either went back and got a masters in a different subject, or is working at Home Depot. They'd kill for a $12/hr job.

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

#658

Post by rayiner » Thu, Oct 13, 2016, 9:45 PM UTC

gcp wrote: post #601

mitchty wrote: post #492

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is it? It looks like on most recent Intel CPUs, it's 3 cycle latency, 1 cycle throughput on a 64-bit register. A 8-bit LUT solution is going to less than 16-bits per cycle on any recent Intel/AMD CPU (maximum of two load ports).

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

#659

Post by SomeCallMeTim » Thu, Oct 13, 2016, 9:45 PM UTC

mooreds wrote: post #86

SomeCallMeTim wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I only have a sample size of one, but I blew threw a phone interview with Google about a year ago -- and the guy giving it was very technically skilled. We talked about the subtler aspects of the questions as we went. They offered an in-person interview, of course, but I declined when I found out that they were only hiring for Google Payments in Boulder. I'm sure the job has interesting aspects, and maybe my imaginat…

I know someone working in that area--apparently lots of string parsing. It's vitally important (moving money usually is) but not very exciting/cutting edge (moving money usually isn't--after all, it's an old technology).

Important? Absolutely.

But I do games, apps, machine learning, IoT, hardware drivers, and deep dives into broken code that no one knows how to fix. Fancy accounting software didn't doesn't strike me as interesting. Even if it involves string parsing. :)

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

#660

Post by dboreham » Thu, Oct 13, 2016, 9:45 PM UTC

scott_s wrote: post #642

dboreham wrote: post #587

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Off-topic pet peeve but why is "OK" now apparently spelled "okay" these days? (especially in bandwidth-limited situations such as SMS or IM). OK is not short for "Okay", OK?

I think "okay" looks better than "OK".

But it is ...wrong. OK originated as an abbreviation so why spell out the pronunciation of the letters? Makes no sense to me.