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Google's “Director of Engineering” Hiring Test

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

#661

Post by gehel »

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…

Scala is statically typed.

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

#662

Post by dkonofalski »

DannyBee wrote: post #500
jnbiche wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On one hand you say that these are "bog-standard" SRE questions, and on the other you say it's "super strange". What exactly is super strange? That a non-technical recruiter asked the questions? If that's not the strange part, then surely it's believable that the recruiter would not recognize some of the subtleties involved? That said, if this guy is the creator of GWAN, then it's entirely possible that his personali…

"What exactly is super strange? " Sure. For starters: 1. This guy apparently did not know he was interviewing for an SRE position. 2. The recruiter was looking for very very specific answers and immediately rejected any others. 3. There was no other discussion of anything, at all.

This is exactly why I think that transcript is a bogus, one-sided take from someone who's dejected and hurt by the fact that they weren't chosen. It reeks of the smell of someone that thinks they were smarter than the interviewer.

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

#663

Post by nebulous1 »

Well, I think it's clear that the author is qualified to move beyond this stage of phone screening. So, the interviewer was at fault for not passing him, mainly due to a lack of technical knowledge imo and possibly and incomplete cheat sheet.

That said, I question how he's phrased some of the question/answer pairs. For instance, this is a phone interview so the questioner can't capitalize KILL in the signals question ("what is the name of the KILL signal?"), which makes me wonder how the question was actually phrased. It does strike me that SIGTERM is what the 'kill' command will send by default, which could have been the intent of the question.

He obviously still should have passed though, all of his answers indicated a good knowledge of the subject, and that's even if you consider them to be ultimately incorrect. I guess it's possible that op's tone didn't ingratiate him to the interviewer, but that's impossible to say with the information we have.

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

#664

Post by whoops1122 »

throwawayIndian wrote: post #644
djsumdog wrote: post #555

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> "Could you write out what an HTTP request and response looks like on the board?" Why should anyone remember what an http request or response should look like? Statically typed vs. dynamically typed language? Fuck. Are these entry-level positions or for someone with 10 years work-ex? A simple search on Google can tell anyone the answer of these questions, why do you expect people to carry an imprint of it in their m…

I would not want to work for or with him, if he asked me that in an interview, I'd walk out.... if he think thats what good computer scientist should know...

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

#665

Post by eternalban »

noufalibrahim wrote: post #194
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…

My father is a civil engineer and late in his career, he interviewed for a senior position at a construction company. He figured out that the interviewer didn't know what he was talking about early on the interview and confronted him with that. The interview came to a end, he was put in touch with a senior engineer at the company. He didn't take the job for other reasons. I don't think this kind of rubbish would fly…

A civil engineer is a professional engineer. I would assume your father is a certified PE [1].

This rubbish flies in our industry since we are not professional engineers.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principles_and_Practice_of_Eng...

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

#666

Post by mikeash »

throwawayIndian wrote: post #644
djsumdog wrote: post #555

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> "Could you write out what an HTTP request and response looks like on the board?" Why should anyone remember what an http request or response should look like? Statically typed vs. dynamically typed language? Fuck. Are these entry-level positions or for someone with 10 years work-ex? A simple search on Google can tell anyone the answer of these questions, why do you expect people to carry an imprint of it in their m…

Static versus dynamic typing is so fundamental that I don't see how a programmer could be remotely competent without having been exposed to those concepts enough to have internalized them. It would be like an accountant not knowing what the number 4 is. Yes, you can look it up, but if you need to then how did you ever get this far?

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

#668

Post by mikeash »

HereBeBeasties wrote: post #610
djsumdog wrote: post #572

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Last time I got that question, I started with nerve impulses.

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

#669

Post by vskarine »

weaksauce wrote: post #552
zeppelin101 wrote: post #533

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can you not know what MVC stands for? It's pretty much a buzzword!

I mean, yeah, 99% of candidates should know what that means because it is an extremely common initialism. Although, I could see some engineer who worked on networking drivers for 10 years might not be up to date on the design patterns of frontend engineering.

That's exactly what happened to me. I was stuck in embedded systems world right out of college and then one day took interview with Google, they were asking me questions clearly looking to hear "MVC" in my answer but I just didn't know it back then...

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

#670

Post by Merovius »

So… someone care to explain to me where I'm going egregiously wrong, apparently? Because, at least on my machine with the code I spewed out quickly, the Kerningham way of counting bits is ~6x slower than a lookup table (including generating the table itself).

http://sprunge.us/IIEH

The Kerningham way code seems faster for very sparse arrays (i.e. only one bit set per uint16), but slower otherwise.

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