Google's “Director of Engineering” Hiring Test • Hacker News Board

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

#801

Post by jameshart » Fri, Oct 14, 2016, 3:50 AM UTC

ubernostrum wrote: post #786

jameshart wrote: post #733

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, those engineers they took on in the last ten years must suck, they've only managed to develop technologies that grew Google's annual revenue from 10 billion dollars in 2006 to 75 billion in 2015. That's the kind of track record that has to make you question the hiring process, right?

You seem to be confusing "I have a smug twitter-sized sound-bite response" for "I have a worthwhile counter-argument". It's a common failing these days, but you should probably look into getting it fixed. That said, yes, Google's hiring process is questionable. The Web is full of horror stories from obviously-qualified people who Google passed on, often very early in the process when no engineer had talked to them, a…

I can expand beyond 140 characters if you like. The OP claimed that in the past ten years, as a result of their hiring practices, Google's product output quality has noticeably declined, presumably as compared to the search product on which their name was made, and gmail, which they launched in 2004. And it's easy and fashionable to knock Google because maps is not as good as you remember it used to be, or because they shut down reader, or because plus didn't manage to unseat facebook.

Well, in 2006 Google was a 10 billion dollar search and ad company with a fledgeling email business without a revenue model, who had just bought youtube. In 2008 they shipped a mobile phone operating system. That's now a thirty billion dollar business which has been built up through talent within google. They undermined Microsoft's office monopoly with an online office suite (okay, some acquisitions underpinning that). They have a credible seat at the top table in the cloud market. And they continued to develop their core ad platform to drive more revenue growth.

I've got no particular reason to stand up for Google, they're quite big enough to look after themselves, but the idea that their product flops in the last decade outweigh those product successes, and can be held up as evidence that there is something deeply rotten in their hiring model, seems to be cherrypicking to me. 70% mobile OS share, 70% search share, and 50% of global online ad revenue... that's a pretty good kind of mediocrity.

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

#802

Post by bpchaps » Fri, Oct 14, 2016, 3:54 AM UTC

dekhn wrote: post #579

bpchaps wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My worst offense of this was for a linux admin position when asked from another abmin about how to list connections on a machine. My answer was "lsof -i, since I've found it's easiest to pull granular information." "lsof just prints open files... you would use netstat, not lsof." I tried correcting him, but he wouldn't listen and ended the call soon after. I never received a call back.

Most people don't know that lsof works into two modes- the typical one is to run it against a process ID. The rarer one is no args, which runs it against everything on the system. however, I observe that lsof needs to run as root to print the same information that netstat -tanp returns for a reglar user.

Yeah, you're right about needing root (edit: for processes not owned by the current user). Though, if you have the access, it's a very, very worthwhile tool to learn:

  ~ $ lsof -a -n -c chrome -iTCP:443 | head -2 #sanitized output
  COMMAND   PID USER   FD   TYPE DEVICE SIZE/OFF NODE NAME
  chrome   1234 me   12u  IPv4 12345      0t0  TCP 127.0.0.1:12345->127.0.0.2:https (ESTABLISHED)

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

#803

Post by ubernostrum » Fri, Oct 14, 2016, 3:55 AM UTC

jameshart wrote: post #801

ubernostrum wrote: post #786

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem to be confusing "I have a smug twitter-sized sound-bite response" for "I have a worthwhile counter-argument". It's a common failing these days, but you should probably look into getting it fixed. That said, yes, Google's hiring process is questionable. The Web is full of horror stories from obviously-qualified people who Google passed on, often very early in the process when no engineer had talked to them, a…

I can expand beyond 140 characters if you like. The OP claimed that in the past ten years, as a result of their hiring practices, Google's product output quality has noticeably declined, presumably as compared to the search product on which their name was made, and gmail, which they launched in 2004. And it's easy and fashionable to knock Google because maps is not as good as you remember it used to be, or because th…

It's still the case that other than search and ads, most of Google's biggest hits were acquired rather than the result of in-house initiatives (even Google Analytics, which is probably one of their more heavily-relied-on products, was acquired). Google doesn't hire people who will create stuff like Android; they hire people who can pass their interview process, and get new product and service lines mostly through acquiring teams of people who probably can't pass their interviews.

It's also the case that Google is acquiring a reputation for bad interview/hiring processes, and for hiring people who have a Ph.D. in CS and putting them to work on CRUD web apps that any random coding-bootcamp grad could build, since there's just not enough interesting in-house work to keep all those top talents occupied.

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

#804

Post by lkbm » Fri, Oct 14, 2016, 3:58 AM UTC

intoverflow2 wrote: post #324

cedarmonk wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So apart from giving the right answers, you now have to intelligently predict when to give wrong or suboptimal answers to account for the inadequacy of the interviewer? Not that I'm blaming the recruiter here because he/she was just trying to do his/her job, but come on. If I were in his shoes, I would be pissed off not because of failing to land the job but because of being told that I gave the "wrong answers" when…

As a director are you not required to be an interface between the technical and non-technical? If you can't dumb it down you're just going to waste peoples time.

Dumbing it down and dumbing it down to precisely the words written on a piece of paper are different things. If the "correct" answer were simply any explanation that the interviewee understood, that would be entirely different and considerably more reasonable.

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

#805

Post by nurettin » Fri, Oct 14, 2016, 4:01 AM UTC

clifanatic wrote: post #684

nurettin wrote: post #34

Perhaps they are looking for a pointy-haired-boss type rather than someone who actually knows his thing.

Sorry, you got too many right, you're not right for this role! Actually, come to think of it, I did have an interview experience like that, just a few years ago. At the time, my title was VP of engineering, but for a small startup. A bigger company was interested in hiring me for a VP-level (or maybe director level, I can't remember) position, and phone screened me. After about ten minutes of talking, he said, "are y…

Thing is, mortals like I know very little about workspace psychology compared to large scale operations such as Google. I have an inkling of an idea because I was repeatedly subjected to the same problematic environment too many times in my 10 year career as a simple software developer with no lead titles.

Off the top of my head:

There is always someone incompetent getting paid more than you. I think this means they are willing to spend money on someone else so you work harder to reach his/her status like a horse going after a carrot it will never reach.

There is always some kind of boss who will not indulge in technical details in order to understand how long a project would really take before pitching the idea to a customer. This is their way of "getting things done" or "making hard things a reality".

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

#806

Post by kev009 » Fri, Oct 14, 2016, 4:25 AM UTC

ubernostrum wrote: post #791

_wmd wrote: post #739

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

At the same time, it's a useful filter for the candidate. Last year when I was job hunting I kept getting fizzbuz-style phone screens, even from companies who'd specifically contacted me because they knew who I was and what my skills/experience were, because they have to be sure to filter out those unqualified core committers of software they use on a daily basis. Anyway, I got asked the "write a palindrome checker"…

In the time since that Google interview, I've moved into management and have built a very high performance team recognized as such by peers and the executive team.

For internal hires, I convinced people to come work for me that I had immense respect for by using casual conversation and pitching the idea and vision for a new operating systems team.

I've found this is also a classy way to hire external people. I've since hired people off freebsd-jobs@ mailing list and twitter by being upfront about the good and bad of working at this company. No trick questions, just a conversation about what we like to work on. This was easy because I had an idea of what they have accomplished by their commit logs.

Most recently I hired two women, masters students, for summer internships. This was very different because I had no idea what the candidates had done as coursework or projects beyond a simple resume. I again used casual conversation, no trick questions. I posed some real world situations, passively seeing if they understood concepts like deadlock, manual memory management, indirection, and had very good working CS/OS vocabulary. This eliminated most of the other candidates, and it was pretty clear who had slogged through their OS and networking classes without passion. I let each person tell me about projects they worked on which really excited them. One had done Linux USB driver on her own time, among other interesting things. The other had implemented a scheduler and file system on a teaching OS as part of her course work. Both worked out phenomenally and both have patches in the FreeBSD.org source tree from the 2 month internship experience. I am very proud of this, and of my team for mentoring them so successfully.

The people I hired were often confused; "That's it?" at the end of the phone or in person interview. They thought they had done something wrong because they are so used to being sweated for the sake of being sweated.

I am now convinced this is the only ethical way to build teams and hire -- start with some seasoned vets then grow new talent while refining and reinforcing shared values.

I don't really see what the stereotypical SV tech interview accomplishes. Blind leading the blind. Leadership is piss poor in this industry.

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

#807

Post by ci5er » Fri, Oct 14, 2016, 4:28 AM UTC

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…

> 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?

It's what happens when you get old. There were commonly C compilers on 8, 16, 20, 24 and 32 bit architectures, some big-endian, some not, and you couldn't google things in 20 seconds back in those bad old days when old farts were building the networks that would be used to connect to us all to google.

(And he has apparently been in networking since)

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

#808

Post by jwatte » Fri, Oct 14, 2016, 4:28 AM UTC

falsedan wrote: post #569

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…

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…

Anyone asking a question should be qualified to interpret the answers in context. If they don't, use a multiple choice quiz or something instead. These questions/answers are just ludicrously out of sync.

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

#809

Post by jwatte » Fri, Oct 14, 2016, 4:31 AM UTC

dilemma wrote: post #711

jsmthrowaway wrote: post #701

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You are drawing a conclusion and you're making it public to discredit this person.

It is true that gwan.com is (still) down.

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

#810

Post by thechao » Fri, Oct 14, 2016, 4:35 AM UTC

PetahNZ wrote: post #703

clifanatic wrote: post #575

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> completely failed even the most basic system / coding questions. But could they at least tell you why quick sort was the best sorting algorithm?

Because its quick, right?

It also sorts.