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Google's “Director of Engineering” Hiring Test

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

#831

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, as someone who went through the process and got through it (so is less inclined to hold a grudge): > Then why ask about the nitty gritty details required by maintenance personnel as part of the screening process - things I would rather have my high level employees looking up rather than relying on a possibly faulty memory. AIUI you can get easily 5 or more of the pre-screen questions wrong and still proceed to th…

> they are written down wrong. Please, feel free to correct the record, then, with the correct screening questions. The proverbial cat is out of the bag, and has gone tearing down the street towards everyone trying to make a buck by "training" hopeful young graduates on how to make it through the Google interview process. > Because an "I interviewed at Google. It was pleasant, everyone was really nice and they got me…

> Please, feel free to correct the record, then, with the correct screening questions.

No can do. I actually like my job. And I also like my coworkers and don't want to make their life any harder.

> No, it won't. Because it's the tech equivalent of a lottery winner saying they think the lottery system is a fair and equitable way to distribute money.

The same goes for a "I interviewed at Google. It was pleasant, everyone was really nice but sadly I didn't got accepted" post.

The fact remains, that you don't read from >99.99% of people. My interview process was very pleasant. I had a bunch of nice conversations about programming and computers with friendly and humorous people.

> Same problem. If you're in, you passed the Google employment lottery, so it's much more interesting (and should be more meaningful to management) when insiders agree that the hiring process has problems.

There are a lot of insiders. With a lot of opinions.

> so long as Google is happy hiring not necessarily the best people for the job, but the ones lucky enough to dodge more false negative flags than everyone else.

Well, the thinking here isn't really "we want strictly the best". That would be a hopeless idea from the get-go. The thinking is "there is a hiring bar that we want people to pass and we want to hire exclusively from above that. We don't care about the sampling of that, as long as we get that". What they end up with is a pretty broad sample of that population. Some (like me probably, tbh) just barely pass the bar, some are the very top. Some other top-people got unfortunately rejected, some other barely passing people too.

So yes. There is indeed no ambition to actually get just the top 100K engineers in the world.

> All that said, yeah, Google's hiring process works for Google. Coming here, to a conversation started by a crappy screening experience, and expecting respect for a process with so many false negatives is a bit optimistic, though.

Well, mostly I (and DannyBee) are just pointing out obvious flaws in the discussion here. Like the obvious self-selection bias and selective reporting. And the also obvious fact that this particular post was written while angry and only represents one side of the story; and that not even accurately.

Secondarily, in these long-wound comment threads on reddit/hackernews/twitter, people seem to usually not even be aware of the goals of the hiring process and think "look, here, three prominent false negatives" is an actual argument about the process being flawed.

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

#832
post #688

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was very similar to my first experience interviewing for an SRE role at Google. After about 20 minutes I got tired of arguing with a clearly non-technical recruiter and politely excused myself. My second interview well, that was a whole different bucket of problems.

Yeah. I'll never interview with Google again. I've got friends who work in (mostly nontechnical) roles there who had very different experiences, but my interview was such a hot mess of disorganization, cluelessness and arrogance that I ended it early and told them I had no interest in the role or the company. Two years on, I think I made the right call.

Yeah I had a somewhat similar experience. My first technical interviewer was 15 minutes late (so it was now a 30 minute interview). Then, after being asked the typical slew of questions (what is a hash table, etc) I was asked to implement a basic data structure (Set). Which was easy enough but my interviewer wouldn't let me finish writing up my implementation and, instead, insisted I focused on optimization of a particular, custom method he asked me to implement. I protested (premature optimization, etc) but ultimately went along with it. I finished optimizing but didn't get a chance to finish my Set by the time the interview was over.

I got an email a week later saying thanks but no thanks with zero explanation. I had gotten everything right, what went wrong? So I had some of my Google friends track down the interviewer and ask. Apparently I didn't continue forward because I didn't finish my Set implementation...

I've had Google contact me on occasion since then. I have not re-applied / re-interviewed with them. Their interview process is already bad enough.

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

#833
post #161

Google doesn't ask these types of trivia questions. I don't believe that you were talking to a person from Google one bit. Everything documented about their hiring practices and anecdotal evidence from people gone through their interview process is that you talk with a real engineer and write code for your interview.

I took a phone screen interview for SRE (site reliability engineer) at Google Dublin and the questions at the screen test were the same, almost to the word.

I don't know this guy but the questions he's talking about are genuine Google screen questions.

Questions in the later interviews (that is, if you pass the initial screen) are more complex, and involve actual coding or longer problem solving.

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

#834
post #593

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought the reason it was generally accepted that the 8-bit lookup table is optimal is because it can fit in the L1 cache.

(Very) embedded developer speaking here. What's this L1 cache you speak of?

It's level 1 CPU cache, the fastest (and smallest) cache.

It caches both instructions and data.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CPU_cache

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

#835

He seems to be pretty proud of GWAN, but it doesn't appear to have stood up well to HN traffic.

Could be his software sucks, or could be that he put it on a single node somewhere on a tiny VPS and he hit some sort of limit by his provider. Not fair to draw any conclusions imo.

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

#836
post #115
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…

Actually, OP replied exactly as he should because after the first few exchanges, you can tell how anal the interviewer is and as such you have to answer accordingly. Some easy going interviewers might say that its about right, some might say its technically right, etc.

Remember, you have to walk through the interview thru OP's mindset and how he took into consideration the interviewer's analness.

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

#837
Moishe Lettvin - What I Learned Doing 250 Interviews at Google https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8RxkpUvxK0

He tells a story where the hiring committee gets like 10 candidate packets, and they refuse to hire a single one of them. Turns out the packets were of the hiring committee members themselves:) https://youtu.be/r8RxkpUvxK0?t=8m50s

So yeah, the system is broken.

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

#839

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…

That's a preposterous attitude. Just imagine if we took a similar approach to hiring for other kinds of jobs: "OK, so you'd like to work here as a mechanic. What's the difference between automatic and manual transmission?" "It's not fair to expect me to know that off the top of my head. If I need to know, I'll just do a Google search."

"OK, so you'd like to work here as a mechanic. What's the difference between automatic and manual transmission?"

Nope, more like "can you write out on the board what types of connectors are used in the car cooling system and in what order".

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

#840
There loss.

I am glad you kept a log of all the questions. I think the problem exists with a lot of tech companies our there. In my short career, I have been asked to solve mathematical problems, which is absolutely fine, but I write web apps that are not even remotely related or perform any complex calculations.

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