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Google's “Director of Engineering” Hiring Test

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

#911

Post by gnurag »

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…

> I'm not drawing a conclusion, but it is tempting.

Except that you did draw a conclusion.

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

#912

Post by asciihacker »

kkapelon wrote: post #12

They asked me the same questions back in 2012. I was applying for a Java developer position. The person asking the questions said right from the start that he is not technical (he was a psychologist) and that he had a cheatsheet in front of him. I passed that telephone call and failed the process later on another call (on the lightbulbs and the 100 floor building) Really surprised to see that 4 years later they still…

    > They asked me the same questions back in 2012. I was applying for a Java developer position.
OMFG.

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

#913

Post by throwawayIndian »

mikeash wrote: post #666
throwawayIndian wrote: post #644

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…

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?

> It would be like an accountant not knowing what the number 4 is.

It's a hypothetical no-go! Every person, even the fourth grader knows the number 4. So why ask a question that measures their ability to remember 4, say 4 or show that they know 4.

> I don't see how a programmer could be remotely competent without having been exposed…

Share this link with them:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1517582/what-is-the-diffe...

Invest in people and people will invest back in your business. Interview process that I follow at my workplace has just one goal to assess: whether or not it'd be great to work with this person and spend over ~50 hours per week with them.

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

#914

Post by mcguire »

mikeash wrote: post #590
falsedan wrote: post #569

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

They do seem typical; the recruiter asked many of those same questions when I interviewed for a SRE position back in about 2004. I particularly enjoyed the bit count; I went back later and confirmed that the bit swiggling approach was faster on the machines I had handy. Large lookup tables have poor cache behavior.

On the other hand, the recruiter did not tell me whether I got the right answer (or I didn't miss any). It was pretty clearly a scripted initial phone screen with someone who wasn't a programmer.

Oh, and they didn't ask anything truly ridiculous like the QuickSort question.

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

#915

Post by asciihacker »

ajmurmann wrote: post #774

What always bothers me with most interview questions is the focus on hard technical stuff that's very easy to acquire and forget and easily relearned. I much more care about a candidates capability to write code that's maintainable. The hard challenges we are facing in our jobs are rarely hardvore technical issues but usually just being able to keep going at a fast pace without drowning in the legacy code we wrote la…

Beyond even that, Google is in sore need of some creative people with business sense. They continually create and cancel products. And the products they create in general just dont fly. Besides email, search engine and ads, they just fluster about confusedly.

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

#916

Post by mcguire »

brazzledazzle wrote: post #649
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 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,…

At one point at least, physical security and recruitment were about the only contractors Google used.

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

#917

Post by mikeash »

throwawayIndian wrote: post #913
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?

> It would be like an accountant not knowing what the number 4 is. It's a hypothetical no-go! Every person, even the fourth grader knows the number 4. So why ask a question that measures their ability to remember 4, say 4 or show that they know 4. > I don't see how a programmer could be remotely competent without having been exposed… Share this link with them: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1517582/what-is-the-di…

Are you hiring fun people who know nothing about computers? Or are there actually more criteria than you let on here?

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

#918

Post by geofft »

dylanfw wrote: post #889
btilly wrote: post #517

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Technically, no. Big-O is a way of categorizing the growth of mathematical functions. Those functions can represent anything. It is wrong to talk about the big-O of an algorithm without specifying what you are measuring. Be it average operations, worst case operations, average memory, worst case memory, amortized average time, amortized average memory, and so on. It happens to be that when we talk informally, we're u…

Apologies. Throughout my CS undergrad I had only been given the impression and understanding that Big-O measured worst case (lower bound, no worse than), Big-Theta average case, and Big-Omega best case (upper bound, no better than). Looking into it more now, I see that there are some more subtleties I either missed in class or was never taught. Thanks for correcting me!

The subtlety here is basically that big-O and big-omega and friends are ways of characterizing functions, and functions map one input to one output. "Running time of a problem of size n" is not a function; it has a range of possible values for a given n. "Maximum running time of a problem of size n" is a function. That function itself, an² + bn + c for some constants a, b, and c, has lower and upper asymptotic bounds.

I thought you were right at first but then realized what was going on. This is a pretty subtle point and mostly uninteresting for well-understood algorithms like quicksort. But one slightly less subtle point is that big-theta isn't average case, it is the combination of big-O and big-omega, i.e., bounded from above and below (possibly with different constant factors) by the same asymptotic behavior.

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

#919

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#920

Post by Kurtz79 »

empath75 wrote: post #796
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…

We actually do let people use Google during our code interviews. They'll use it at work, so why not. We do watch them work though so if they just copy and paste from stack overflow and they don't understand the problem, it's pretty obvious.

It depends on the questions.

If you require using real, compiler correct language in a coding exercise, and the problem is not trivial, than allowing search is more than fair.

But the point of Fizzbuzz is being such trivial problem that it really should not require nothing more than an understanding of basic programming logic and constructs.

In my (limited) experience, there were instances where the candidate could not even decide on a programming language to use, I told them to use pseudo-code and they still flunked horribly.

Aside from that, Fizbuzz is rarely a dealbreaking task in itself, it tends to correlate pretty well with the overall performance, I would be surprised seeing someone failing fizzbuzz and excelling in the rest of the interview (once again, in my limited experience).

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