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Google's “Director of Engineering” Hiring Test

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

#861

Post by hvidgaard »

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…

On the other hand, you are interviewing a programmer. Their daily life revolve around technicalities where the difference between returns and fills matter a great deal. Expecting them, all of a sudden, to throw that out of the window and parse technical questions in a hand wavy way is ridiculous.

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

#862

Post by pawelkomarnicki »

janoc wrote: post #722
ozgung wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you're saying Google's recruiters don't tell what position they are interviewing for and that they found a 20+ years experienced engineering manager holding patents on computer networking under-qualified for an ordinary site maintenance position. Well, that sounds like a dumb recruitment process.

They really don't. I have been called by one of their headhunters recently who explicitly refused to tell me what sort of position I would be interviewing for. He told me that: "That is not how we work. We will evaluate your abilities and then, if you pass, offer you a position on a team that we deem best fitting your skills." Needless to say I have thanked him for his time and declined. I am not going to fly to anot…

Both sound like IT Hunger Games ;-)

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

#863

Post by vshan »

zeven7 wrote: post #744
djsumdog wrote: post #572

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The entirety of HN seems to have something against Competitive coding.

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

#864

Post by kkapelon »

masto wrote: post #608

I'm not going to go into specifics (I like my job and want to keep it), but the versions of these questions quoted in the blog, especially where the questions seem stupid and wrong, are not on accurate representation of actual SRE prescreen questions. It's possible that the recruiter somehow garbled them, or perhaps the blog's author is misremembering them after a stressful and frustrating conversation. But if you re…

If you scan the whole comments section now you will find at least 8 people (including me) that say they had the same questions with the same wording.

Do you think a of particular question that you believe is different in the way Google asks it and the transcript of the OP?

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

#865

Post by kkapelon »

masto wrote: post #629
smnscu wrote: post #625

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well I had the first call with a recruiter this Monday about a Google SRE-TPM role, and I got the exact same questions – granted, presented as a warm up.

If you had literally the same questions, worded the same, there's something horribly broken (or you got the same broken recruiter). I think you're remembering similar questions (e.g. they asked the one about the potato) but the details make a huge difference.

Scan the whole comments section now and you will find multiple people saying they got the exact same questions (I am one of them)

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

#866

Post by Klockan »

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…

> They'd be internal to recruiting

I managed to find them and I don't work in recruiting, they are for SRE pre-screens. The guy misunderstood most of the questions which is why he failed and then worded them incorrectly on his blog, it wasn't the fault of the questions or the interviewer.

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

#867

Post by exDM69 »

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…

These were done in recruitment events at universities and the applicants were free to access Google if they wished. Some guys even went to the computer lab to do the assignments on a computer and then return a printout of their code. And we were completely fine with that.

But really, if an applicant needs to google to solve FizzBuzz, they don't have a firm grasp of the fundamentals. You're required to write one loop, a few if/then/elses and understand how the modulo operator works. Our jobs are much more demanding than that.

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

#868

Post by ojilles »

ubernostrum wrote: post #775
mikeash wrote: post #666

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Static versus dynamic typing is so fundamental that I don't see how a programmer could be remotely competent without having been exposed to those concepts enough to have internalized them. It would be like an accountant not knowing what the number 4 is. Yes, you can look it up, but if you need to then how did you ever get this far?

OK, ask me that question about defining the difference and I'll argue with the question, and back up my argument with examples of how type systems are far more of a spectrum of different cases than a stark static/dynamic binary. And then your non-engineer phone screener who's expecting the answer to match the scripted sheet will conclude that I don't know this "fundamental" thing and thus am unqualified.

Which would be true, or rather: over-qualified.

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

#869

Post by philjr »

vram22 wrote: post #589
tptacek wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In C, what stat does is how you return multiple values from a function. lstat has the same signature as stat: it passes the stat structure back through an output pointer.

>In C, what stat does is how you return multiple values from a function. IIRC, you can return structs from functions in C. You have to access the values in the returned struct with dot notation, of course, like point.x . Pre-ANSI C may not have had this, but later, it did. Remember reading it in the 2nd (ANSI) edition of the Kernighan & Ritchie C book, and also used it myself in some programs. https://www.google.co.i…

returning multiple values was the key part of the sentence

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

#870

Post by lgieron »

pzh wrote: post #779

That's not so surprising with Google, I'm afraid. I had the exact same questions (apparently for SRE-SWE prescreen), but a slightly more intelligent recruiter (who had actually chased me for 2 years before I agreed to interview, so they were a bit more invested than the OP's guy). I went on to a phone screen and then on-site interviews, and then the hiring committee. The HC decided that coding/algo was strong, but th…

> My actual areas of expertise (for the last 10 years) are 3D graphics and computational geometry.

If I may ask, what put you off your former field so that you decided to move to the server-side world?

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