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Google's “Director of Engineering” Hiring Test

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

#741

Post by nialo »

pyb wrote: post #707
tptacek wrote: post #683

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you can probably predict it: I would generate a work-sample test for it. For a network programmer, I might have them implement a 3WH coded directly to pcap_write() (which requires you to populate the Ethernet frame header). Like the best work-sample challenges, doing a raw 3WH is kind of fun if you haven't done it before. My friends and I used to spend bar nights drinking over torturous interview questions (y…

What is a 3WH ?

Probably "3 way handshake", see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmission_Control_Protocol#...

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

#742

Post by CobrastanJorji »

whoops1122 wrote: post #671
zzzcpan wrote: post #594

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I see where you're going, and I generally agree with you, but I think that every programmer should at least be able to FizzBuzz, just as every architect or master home builder should be able to answer the question "which one of these is a brick?"

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

#743

Post by dekhn »

Periodic wrote: post #380
elcritch wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally, these questions and the way the recruiter asked them reaffirm my view that Google would not be a place I'd like to work at as a experienced software developer. First the recruiter's lack of technical knowledge points toward a beaurocratic or management first mindset common (necessary?) in such a large company. Second, the questions and expected answers seem biased toward just graduating but smart engineer…

I wouldn't be surprised if the interview process for experienced engineers is unrefined. At this point in Google's lifecycle most of the qualified, experienced engineers who would want to work at Google already do. There are orders of magnitude more new-grad engineers to interview and so it makes sense that they would lack the practice and refinement on those candidates, even if those are the most valuable candidates…

I'm a software engineer who really didn't know much about recursion or algorithmic analysis- I was a bio major/computer hacker. I did terrible on my first set of google interviews, at least on the algorithmic questions.

None of that was a reasonable predictor of my future performance at Google. You would have filtered out a perfectly good candidate (and this is, IMHO, the biggest issue is that Google rejects a number of people who would be great employees with its early filters). I can't say I have a better system.

The only interviews that made any sense for the time I got hired were the ones with the specific team members I was going to join. Once we got to chatting it was pretty clear I was a good technical fit for the team.

I still want to emphasize I don't have a solution to the high false negative rate in the pre-screening procecss.

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

#744

Post by zeven7 »

djsumdog wrote: post #572
optimuspaul wrote: post #510

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. Why the hell would you ask someone at that level basic questions like fizz buzz? It's absurd. I also tend to shy away from asking coding questions in interviews, they don't tell me much about aptitude for critical thinking and culture fit. Skills can be taught but culture is much harder. ... But I'm not saying to throw in some questions that don't prove that they are actually competent, just be casual about…

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…

> In a list, find all the number pairs that add up to another number in the list.

You're saying this is a bad question because it's too complicated? Am I missing something? It really doesn't seem more complicated than the paragraph question to me, but maybe I'm having a brain lapse.

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

#745

Post by zeven7 »

throw_away_777 wrote: post #691
exDM69 wrote: post #598

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My company has been giving the fizzbuzz for students applying for internship, with any language they wish and extra for style points. The results speak for themself. All the good applicants do it in no time, without hesitation and give a perfect answer and usually some style points on top. The ones who have second grade coding skills have always something wrong with it. It's a good 5 minute test whether someone can c…

How do you know the people failing your interview process have "second grade coding skills"? The fundamental challenge with evaluating interviews is that companies don't hire people who flunk interviews - so there is no easy way to reliably measure the false negative rate. Does fizzbuzz ability correlate with coding ability? Maybe, but you'd have to hire people who fail fizzbuzz to definitely answer the question. I k…

I'm not sure about OP, but there is a tech company that has said it hires people who fail their interviews occasionally to see if their interview process is working. That company is the one that is the subject of this thread.

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

#746

Post by darklajid »

zeppelin101 wrote: post #533
_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…

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

Right. Everyone and their mum know what M and V stands for, right? Now .. C? C is tricky. Please don't ask any further questions about C, will you?

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

#747

Post by brazzledazzle »

klodolph wrote: post #730
brazzledazzle wrote: post #649

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't be surprised if the recruiter just googled to find a list of questions and answers. This candidate probably isn't even on any official radar. The recruiter probably just uses this as a means to evaluate candidates before they officially call dibs on them. Google could very well be different since they do many things differently but recruiting has always been a sales position with everything it comes with,…

I don't think that's what happened. The questions look too familiar to me, and I've been through the SRE-SWE interview process which is what the top-level comment talks about.

Maybe it's the whole "better to have false negatives than false positives" philosophy Google espouses?

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

#748

Post by icedchai »

I had this almost exact same Google phone screen, in 2010, for an SRE position. I'm 100% certain this is not a director-level test. I thought it was incredibly simple.

The second interview (phone interview with an engineer) was challenging. The third was on-site, and I failed, but was still a good experience. I'm a "small startup" type anyway.

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

#749

Post by throw_away_777 »

zeven7 wrote: post #745
throw_away_777 wrote: post #691

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you know the people failing your interview process have "second grade coding skills"? The fundamental challenge with evaluating interviews is that companies don't hire people who flunk interviews - so there is no easy way to reliably measure the false negative rate. Does fizzbuzz ability correlate with coding ability? Maybe, but you'd have to hire people who fail fizzbuzz to definitely answer the question. I k…

I'm not sure about OP, but there is a tech company that has said it hires people who fail their interviews occasionally to see if their interview process is working. That company is the one that is the subject of this thread.

Can you cite your source? I haven't seen this anywhere.

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

#750

Post by zeven7 »

DannyBee wrote: post #553
JimboOmega wrote: post #543

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably late 2000s when I was last on site. Google bugs me every year (most recently a week or two ago), but I don't usually push on the process.

Interesting. I could look up the date it changed, but it definitely changed because folks didn't like the old way :P. Now, instead, they generally don't recruit (google is too large to not have exceptions) without some specific hiring managers and headcount in mind. They will tell you what those groups are and what they do. So for example, the person i interviewed last week was targeted at two teams. I actually speci…

I interviewed at Google in March 2014 and was given an offer. I wasn't interviewing for a specific team. After the in-person interviews my recruiter set me up with 2 different team managers to talk to about potentially joining their team. I wasn't interested in either team, and my recruiter said "That's ok, we'll find a place for you," and a few days later found a new manager for me to chat with. I joined their team.

I did know I was interviewing for a general SWE role, but not anything more than that, and from all appearances the team was completely up in the air until after my interviews.

I don't know how much has changed since 2014. I also didn't get any of these pre-screen testing questions from a non-engineer. Is that normal practice for all interviews now?

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