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Google's “Director of Engineering” Hiring Test

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

#761

Post by thwd »

dilemma wrote: post #725
microtherion wrote: post #647

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having only seen the candidate's paraphrase of that conversation (and never having worked for or interviewed with Google), I would STILL be inclined to give that candidate a thumbs down. To solve difficult technical discussions, it's important to be able to restate the other side's arguments in the light most favorable to THEM , while the candidate was entirely focused on paraphrasing the interviewer's argument in th…

So what you want to see from the author is a Mao-era self-criticism stating why Google were 100% right in rejecting him.

I think they mean that if you realize you're talking to a non-techie then you should make an effort to use simple words. Your TCP hex opcode knowledge does not impress someone who doesn't know what hex or TCP is. Figuring that they must be looking for an answer along the lines of "SYN/ACK" is a skill as well. A people skill.

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

#762

Post by davesque »

edanm wrote: post #115
mox1 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The question was what function "returns" an inode. Those functions return a error code, you pass in a stat structure and the function populates that structure. He was saying (correctly), that they don't return (in the classic C sense) the inode. They return an error code. To me that is a big difference... int lstat(const char path, struct stat buf); vs stat* lstat(const char *path); 2 completely different functions.

This strikes me as an entirely trivial point, the meaning of the question was pretty clear. It wasn't "what is the literal return value". Many APIs will return error codes, and people still talk about them as "returning" certain values colloquially. Of course, if the OP's answer would've been "it returns an error code :) but I assume you're talking about..." I would think that's fine. Btw, that is the only thing I re…

I can't disagree with you enough. Engineers should always strive to be as clear as possible about what they're doing. The word "return" has a precise meaning in the C language. If the recruiter was unaware of that, that's their bad entirely.

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

#763

Post by wpietri »

Morgawr wrote: post #464
sfrailsdev wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From what I've heard, google intentionally screws with timing, who you will be speaking to, and other factors in order to try to understand how you deal with changes in circumstances.

This is blatantly false. Source: I work for Google. Our daily schedule is packed with meetings and we try to be as on time as possible, interviews (which are something that everybody should be doing) work exactly the same, we don't try to screw people over with bad timing just to "test" them. Sometimes it happens that people miss interviews and somebody else has to show up, this is unfortunately a problem and it shou…

I know you don't set up the system, so I'm not blaming you here. But this is the problem:

> Our daily schedule is packed with meetings and we try to be as on time as possible

If Google's goal were to respect the candidate's time, interviewers wouldn't have daily schedules packed with meetings. The less slack in a system, the worse the failures are. That employees try to be "as on time as possible" is a sign that everybody understands the scheduling is unrealistic.

This isn't unusual, by the way. Most hiring processes don't optimize for candidate experience. Or even for good hiring decisions. Indeed, if you take a POSIWID view of typical hiring processes, the point is to make interviewers feel powerful and selecting for people people willing to put up with inefficiency and suspicious power dynamics.

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

#764

Post by kentonv »

wpietri wrote: post #757
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…

I gather you didn't run this by your PR folks: > Particularly, when one side presents something that makes the other side look like a blithering idiot, the likelihood it's 100% accurate is, historically, "not great". I get that you are happy at Google, that you want to defend your employer. But implying the guy's a liar or a fool does not help. If anything, it makes me more likely to believe that Google has something…

Well, I mean, he's right: any time a story seems outrageous and unbelievable, it's often because it has been embellished at least somewhat. That doesn't mean it's completely false either, though.

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

#765

Post by kev009 »

_wmd wrote: post #739
kev009 wrote: post #736

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This blog is exactly what an SRE interview is like. I breezed through these kinds of questions with the recruiter since I'm younger have a fairly fresh CS background. Then, my first SRE staff interviewer primarily asked how I would build a data center on the moon. I work on the FreeBSD kernel and TCP full time. I know what BDP, window sizing, head of line blocking, etc are way beyond what a typical SRE would and how…

> even though I would rate myself more knowledgeable than my questioner Don't get me wrong, I'm guessing you know your stuff, but you also strike me as someone who may likely have failed on culture fit down the line. Interviewers are often more sensitive to attitude than they ever are to aptitude, and for good reason, your HVAC knowledge may be irrelevant once you discover the custom designs in use behind closed door…

That may well be the case. The reason I quit the interview is because I evaluate a potential employer while they are evaluating me.. I really love when someone asks "do you have any questions for me?" and take full advantage to try and get candid knowledge of a team and more importantly leadership. I determined Google would not be a good fit for me.

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

#766

Post by jsmthrowaway »

Gigablah wrote: post #752
dilemma wrote: post #740

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Underwrite his mortgage and ask him to be the godfather of your firstborn.

Looks like he really did hit a sore nerve.

The repeated charge that I am somehow disparaging and discrediting an individual was my clue that I should probably disengage. I probably should have worded the first bullet differently, in hindsight, but still.

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

#767

Post by scrollaway »

noploop wrote: post #298
dkonofalski wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm just reaching here, but is there a chance at all that the test wasn't really about whether or not he knew the correct answers but more that he knew the correct answers and was able to simplify them to the extent that a non-technical user could understand and compare them? I have a feeling that Google is far more interested in someone being able to get their point across than someone that just wants to sit there a…

Click around on his site a bit and you'll get a pretty solid impression of what kind of a guy we're talking about here.

I flagged your comment because you basically created an account to shit on somebody.

Or to put it in terms you'll understand, clicking around on your comment history a bit, we get a pretty solid impression of what kind of guy you are.

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

#768

Post by csallen »

jsmthrowaway wrote: post #701
mikeash wrote: post #590

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd hope it's not too typical, since four out of the ten official answers are wrong, and even one of the questions manages to be wrong. (Specifically, the "why is quicksort the best?" is just completely ridiculous.) It's one thing to blindly apply a simple questionnaire without thinking about the answers that come back, and yet another thing to do it with a questionnaire that's doesn't even get stuff right.

I was asked the "what syscall returns an inode?" question (and agree with DannyBee that this is extremely similar to my successful SRE screen) and I answered stat() without the clarification because I understood what the screener was doing and the parameters in which she was operating. That context on how phone screens work is missing from this transcript, but it's also unfair to expect that sort of context from a ca…

Although I can see why it's tempting to poke fun at this situation, his site could be down for any number of reasons not directly related to the quality of the code he wrote for G-WAN.

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

#769

Post by softawre »

brianwawok wrote: post #709
zzzcpan wrote: post #678

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Could you explain how static typing makes less safe programs?

Static typing is basically a bunch of free type-based unit tests. You can write safer programs in dynamic languages, but you need to write and maintain a lot more tests.

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

#770

Post by teh_user »

This wasn't a technical interview, it was an asshole detector. And it worked.

This test was written by somebody who knows the answers as well as this interviewee. It might have even been administered by somebody who is also in on the game. A tech prima donna like this is team cyanide. I once had to escalate to the VP of Engineering to get one such engineer off my project. The entire work atmosphere improved after he was removed.

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