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Google's “Director of Engineering” Hiring Test (2016)

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Re: Google's “Director of Engineering” Hiring Test (2016)

#71

Post by nateburke »

I had the opportunity to speak with someone who was on the hiring committee at google when the company scaled from ~5k employees to ~20k employees. This was the committee of people in charge of designing the interview funnel though I'm not sure if it was for engineering, specifically, or the whole company.

He said that there were two very large compromises that had to be made in order to hit those growth numbers:

1. Near-total reliance on gpa and school prestige for entry-level position initial resume screening

2. Relaxation of membership controls on the internal pool of people at Google qualified to administer the "is googley?" culture fit interview

I would not be surprised if "allowing non-technical people to pre-screen technical people" is a similar growth-forward HR compromise made, resulting in the OP's suboptimal experience.

Re: Google's “Director of Engineering” Hiring Test (2016)

#73

Post by Retric »

eli wrote: post #63
ionforce wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> then I started criticizing the interview process and (more importantly) Google Finance as being pretty bad, and this really upset everyone. Not rocket science, everybody. Who knew that people don't respond well to being criticized by strangers! Nobel Prize.

I'd love to hear thoughtful constructive criticism during an interview. But unsolicited negativity would be a bit of a flag.

Seems like a complete wast of time in an interview. If you join then sure mention it, and if your rejected you can send an email or something but it's not constructive during an interview.

Re: Google's “Director of Engineering” Hiring Test (2016)

#74

Post by psyc »

crispyporkbites wrote: post #53
s17n wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I make it a point to not read resumes unless I'm supposed to be asking questions about their contents, to avoid bias.

Is this sarcasm? You just make your entire hiring call on talking to the person without looking at their career, academics and skills?

I doubt it's sarcasm. I've often lamented that as a 30-year 'veteran' I'm still often treated as though I'm probably incompetent, until proven otherwise beyond a reasonable doubt. Some people do ignore my CV. I know that some people believe this is right and necessary because you can't trust anyone. I believe it's a travesty in this industry, and if I am treated this way, I'm walking straight out the door and into my next opportunity.

Re: Google's “Director of Engineering” Hiring Test (2016)

#75

Post by logicallee »

yomly wrote: post #18
huhwhaa23 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't get it. Integers include negative numbers, so -4 and 4 are both integers. Why would you select C? Because you're assuming the recruiter doesn't know what an integer is, based on the fact that all the answer choices are positive integers?

I think the point was to deliberately choose an example that would be understood by most the readership but sufficiently technical that it might be seen as an ambiguous question to someone less technical. Reminds me a bit of those facebook clickbait posts "This question is so hard that only 5% of people will get it right"

I actually mean it as a real example. If given this stupid question I would actually, in real life, choose 4 (while knowing it is the incorrect answer.) This is due to the exact phrasing and the other choices given.

Re: Google's “Director of Engineering” Hiring Test (2016)

#76

Post by johannes1234321 »

crispyporkbites wrote: post #53
s17n wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I make it a point to not read resumes unless I'm supposed to be asking questions about their contents, to avoid bias.

Is this sarcasm? You just make your entire hiring call on talking to the person without looking at their career, academics and skills?

For an engineer who is doing an interview it is hard to judge those things written there. There are other stages (i.e. before an techbical interview is setup) where those are checked in depth.

For the technical interviewer knowing a bit about the candidate can help to start in an area where the candidate should have experience and then move into the direction you are interviewing for, of you have a clear set of requirements for the job however can also directly start there.

Re: Google's “Director of Engineering” Hiring Test (2016)

#77

Post by DannyBee »

DannyBee wrote: post #69

So, as part of my job, I have been the hiring manager for directors for Google (3 in the past 6 months), and recruit quite a bit. This was a simple phone screen, and it seems the recruiter was not given a good set of questions. However, I actually doubt it was really a director of engineering screen, despite this person's experience level (maybe it should have been, but ...). I say this because I know a lot of the le…

It turns out this post is from 2016 and i already said the exact same thing then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12701272

Re: Google's “Director of Engineering” Hiring Test (2016)

#78

Post by jerf »

wyldfire wrote: post #27

> Me: on which kind of CPU? Why not let me compare my code to yours in a benchmark? While I agree that this is the right answer, questions regarding "Big-O" are trying to find out whether or not you can evaluate the complexity of an algorithm. If you can, you have some hope of writing different useful benchmarks that could be compared, where sometimes you can see orders of magnitude of improvement. If you can't, you…

"While I agree that this is the right answer, questions regarding "Big-O" are trying to find out whether or not you can evaluate the complexity of an algorithm."

Most algorithms for counting bits will be O(1) for a given int, so O(number of ints) for a list of ints. Algorithms that aren't O(1) for a given int [1] will still be essentially O(1) since the upper bound would be so tight. So I don't think that was a Big-O question.

[1]: "count = 0; while i != 0 { count += i % 2; i >> 2 }". Technically this is O(leftmost set bit), but on a fixed-bit int could be considered O(1) with a suitable constant. Note that algorithm isn't entirely pointless; it works on bigints too, so in something like Python where ints and bigints are not distinguished by type you could use it as a fallback for "generic int" (which may include user-defined classes). (Though of course there are ways to speed it up.)

Re: Google's “Director of Engineering” Hiring Test (2016)

#79

Post by jstimpfle »

rorykoehler wrote: post #44
w8rbt wrote: post #34

Same experience here with the trivia questions. They called me out of the blue about 10 years ago and said they wanted to interview me. So I said OK. Later, during the interview, the questions were largely trivia. How do you remove a file using the rm command when the file is named -f? I was like, what sane person would name a file -f? Anyway, after I got over the shock of the question... you can ./-f, use the absolu…

Surely the correct answer is you Google how to do it!?

These questions are supposed to work as a proxy for experience. Everybody can google the answer to trivia, but if an applicant doesn't know the answer by heart that's an indication for lack of experience.

Re: Google's “Director of Engineering” Hiring Test (2016)

#80

Post by bootloop »

Interesting. My Google Interview started with 1h interviews with two Software Engineers (who were working on Google AdWords) They asked mostly data structure questions and gave a short exercise which I had to solve.

The first engineer had obviously lack of exp and interest in this process, the second one was a lot more pleasant to talk to and I felt a lot more comfortable. (Unrelated to my actual performance which was properly not good enough in any case.)

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