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

671–680 of 969 posts

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

#671

Post by whoops1122 »

zzzcpan wrote: post #594
wffurr wrote: post #512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The most beautiful and elegant part of coding is the logic, Not how to use a for loop. Anything question that can be answered with google should be forbid from a interview test. show him a method, ask him how he can improve the performance. ask him a opinion based question on OO design.

if you hiring a house builder u would not ask him what a brick looks like right?

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

#672

Post by dgacmu »

DannyBee wrote: post #651
falsedan wrote: post #569

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ...

But they appear to be changed in subtle ways from what's listed on other sites. For example, googling for: Google SRE interview questions inode

returns a few hits, including:

https://www.glassdoor.com/Interview/Linux-system-call-for-in...

which lists the question as "system call for inode data" - which is importantly different from a system call to return an actual inode.

This post says something similar: http://gregbo.livejournal.com/182506.html

"There were some questions I just didn't remember the answers to, such as "What system call gives all the information about an inode?" and "What are the fields in an inode?""

(Argh, the blog post is down, so I can't compare some of the others, but several of them seemed to have been changed in ways that made the question itself seem wrong.)

((Thanks to leetrout below for bopping me on the head with the google cache. Next bit added thanks to said bop.))

Another one: The blog post lists "what is the name of the KILL signal?", but googling for: google sre interview questions kill signal

turns up this post on glassdoor: https://www.glassdoor.com/Interview/site-reliability-enginee...

Which lists the question as "What signal does the "kill" command send by default?"

That matches much more the answer SIGTERM that the interviewer was described as insisting on.

That suggests a few likely possibilities: (a) The interviewer misread the questions; (b) There was a horrible communication failure between the interviewer and the interviewee; (c) The interviewee failed to actually listen to the questions before answering.

I have no information with which to assign weights to those possibilities, but all of them seem more likely than "the interview questions themselves are actually this horrible" (they're not as broken as the blog post made them out to be. After writing this, I looked.)

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

#673

Post by thaumasiotes »

dboreham wrote: post #587
potatolicious wrote: post #430

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" 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…

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?

"These days"? It's been spelled that way for nearly 100 years.

> Spelled out as okeh, 1919, by Woodrow Wilson, on assumption that it represented Choctaw okeh "it is so" (a theory which lacks historical documentation); this was ousted quickly by okay after the appearance of that form in 1929.

http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?search=okay

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

#675

Post by clifanatic »

zxcvvcxz wrote: post #558

This is weird - do big companies actually ask stupid questions I can google, and let non-technical people lecture engineers on Big-O? Hope this obviously talented person finds more meaningful employment elsewhere.

> do big companies actually ask stupid questions I can google

Well, he was interviewing _for_ google. Maybe they wrote up the test before google was online and forgot to update it.

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

#676

Post by thaumasiotes »

nl wrote: post #630
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?

It has always been an alternative spelling.

Not so; as you can see in my other comment's link, we can cite OK about 90 years before we can cite "okay", and more reliably than that we can cite the alternative spelling "okeh" to 1919, which establishes pretty well that "okay" was not standard then.

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

#678

Post by zzzcpan »

mikeash wrote: post #666
throwawayIndian wrote: post #644

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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?

It is also a ridiculously dogmatic question. Many people believe into a fallacy that static typing makes safer programs, for example, and expect that somewhere in the answer.

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

#680

Post by thaumasiotes »

dboreham wrote: post #660
scott_s wrote: post #642

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Because the connection to a 180-year-old fad for misspelling "all correct" is so obscure and non-obvious that it was lost long ago? Do you think we should be capitalizing LASER, too?
Post reply on HN