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Google's “Director of Engineering” Hiring Test
- asimuvPR 10y agoSometimes I wonder if this approach has hurt Google's ability to innovate.
- jonathankoren 10y agoNah. Having 57,000 employees did that.
- Cybourgeoisie 10y agoThis hiring test makes me cringe. How is this any better than taking a multiple choice test in college? These questions asked should invite back-and-forth conversation like the author is providing, especially when the company is seeking out highly qualified candidates.
- wiyarmir 10y agoSounds like somebody very butthurt that did not bother to do a quick search and see that first call is with a recruiter who knows little or nothing about technology and is looking for exact-word answers.
- venomsnake 10y agoI think he was mildly amused.
- wiyarmir 10y agoNot saying that this "ceremony" is right in the first place though. But it is easy to prepare for and go through.
- cedarmonk 10y agoSo 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 they were clearly right.
- intoverflow2 10y agoAs 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.
- megous 10y agoDumbing stuff down is not the same as giving the exact answer on some cheat sheet you've nerver seen.
- lkbm 10y agoDumbing 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.
- kkapelon 10y agoThey 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 do this.
- kmonsen 10y agoThis is really weird and should not be happening. I am a software developer and do a lot of interviews including phone interviews. These kind of questions are not expected, but I would say the lightbulb one is not super horrible as long as it is the discussion that was valued and not the answer. I have gotten weirder questions for sure when interviewing.
- kzisme 10y agoI didn't hear about the light bulb drop question until this thread, and was surprised how in-depth it can go. Can you really "fail" an interview on a question like that? I assume the person conducting the interview is reviewing your process of coming to an answer rather than getting the most correct answer - right? By most correct I found this article that broke down the question/answer: https://pointlessprogramming.wordpress.com/2011/03/11/2-light-bulbs-and-a-100-story-building-solution/ https://pointlessprogramming.wordpress.com/2011/03/11/2-ligh...
- Ph0X 10y agoIn theory, that's basically the idea of most questions asked during interviews (except maybe very basic CS ones). The idea is that they will look at how you approach the problems. If you already know it and spew out a memorized answer, it's much less interesting to them than if you've never heard it before and you approach it with a clever way (even if you don't get the answer). But yes, in practice, YMMV.
- beamatronic 10y ago
- burkaman 10y agoIs this common for higher level positions at Google? I've gotten a similar kind of phone screen, but for an entry level software engineer position, and getting a few "wrong" was not a big deal. It's just so they can avoid setting up a real interview with someone who doesn't know the basics. If the call actually went like this, it seems like you just hit a new/not very good recruiter.
- adekok 10y ago> It's just so they can avoid setting up a real interview with someone who doesn't know the basics. They're (allegedly) interviewing for a Director of Engineering. If google can't even google the guy and look at his track record, code, whatever, they don't deserve to have competent people working for them.
- burkaman 10y agoI know, that's why I would be surprised if this is standard practice for high level positions. But even if it is, this is unusually bad execution. My recruiter had at least surface level knowledge of the concepts and was able to ask follow-up questions if I got something half right, he wasn't just looking for verbatim responses.
- DannyBee 10y ago"Is this common for higher level positions at Google?" No, and in fact, it's so far outside the norm i'm not even sure what to make of it. Like I said elsewhere, my best guess is that he was really being evaluated for a much lower level TL/M position in SRE or somewhere. (The detailed linux questions are usually a giveaway that SRE is involved)
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- chr15 10y agoFor those doubting the interview, I was asked many of these same questions for a mid-level role by the recruiter just a couple of months ago. It's real. Passed the phone screen, but decided not to continue.
- fatdog 10y agoI think this is a very equitable process. If a medium-functioning retarded person wouldn't hire you, that's saved the company like $100 of time to ascertain your qualifications. This is much better than using biased metrics like problem solving sessions or personal assessments of character from people who will be working with them.
- overcast 10y agoThis is hilariously depressing. Makes me never want to bother with the big guys.
- tptacek 10y agoThese would be stupid questions even if they weren't being administered by a non-programming recruiter.
- greg7mdp 10y agoHahaha, that is funny/tragic. Outsourcing hiring a director of engineering to a moron with a cheat sheet! Your answers were great, though, and indeed on the systems I have tried the popcount() computation with the bit shifts you suggested is faster than using an 8 bit lookup table. (however the SSE4 popcnt (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SSE4#POPCNT_and_LZCNT https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SSE4#POPCNT_and_LZCNT) is faster still).
- KirinDave 10y agoWhile I think these things are super interesting trivia, I really want to ask the question: "Why does a Director of Engineering for Google need to know this?" That is not only a rather unusual question (within the scope of daily tasks for a programmer, these tend to be an important minority for a project), but it's one that's best settled empirically and within the context of your execution environment. There are a lot of different answers to the question depending on where you're doing it and how you want to impact the machine. It's a bizarre question to pose to Director level, because the proper response even for a technical director should be, "The answer to that changes quickly, we should measure and check what our environment's latest capabilities are and if they are reliable." I mean I'm all gung ho to program stuff, but I think that'd be a massive misapplication of my time with that title in my current job, and given my other responsibilities I'd only do it more slowly than someone with dedicated focus.
- yAnonymous 10y agoMaybe they set unrealistic expectations to see if the applicant lies about meeting them and give wrong answers to see if the person acts like a smartass.
- devhead 10y agoterrible interview questions, that's why only technical people should be giving technical interviews. Most answers to questions are more nuanced than a straight quantifiable answer they have on a sheet of paper.
- Retric 10y agoThis right here is why Google hit the wall and stopped innovating. Which is sad because they seem to be trying really hard.
- samuell 10y agoSo much this. They would have missed Einstein & co.
- buttershakes 10y agoI had almost exactly this same engineering test when google interviewed me in 2006. It was terrible, and left a bad taste in my mouth. Given the complexity of the work I was doing at the time, the entire thing seemed ridiculous.
- TheCapn 10y agoThe inode question gave me flashbacks to my interview with Amazon. They wanted me to explain what a hash function is. I kept giving answers for about 3 minutes explaining hashing, common algorithms, reasons to use it and places it applies. Recruiter: "I was looking for you to say it's a fingerprint" So I guess I was wrong, because despite explaining them in decent detail, I didn't use the one keyword.
- dekhn 10y agoonly some hash functions are fingerprints. Other hash functions are the exact opposite of a fingerprint.
- lucb1e 10y agoI know some hash functions are not meant to create unique fingerprints (they're to pick a bucket to put/look in), but what do you mean by the opposite of a fingerprint?
- dekhn 10y agoThe goal of a fingerprint hash is to convert an input space of "large" values to an output space where the output space values are much shorter- typically fixed size and two similar input values have effectively random outputs (without spending the CPU cycles to implement a cryptographic hash). This permits a wide range of optimizations (a document can be fingerprinted, and looked up by its fingerprint, to see if it's a cache, has associated data, etc). A non-fingerprinting hash function - well, one example of one- is something that for similar inputs, produces the same output (similarity being defined by some distance metric). See, for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locality-sensitive_hashing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locality-sensitive_hashing and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MinHash https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MinHash Confusingingly, many functions that are used for similarity detection are called Fingerprints, (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acoustic_fingerprint https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acoustic_fingerprint), but I consider that a distinct use of the term.
- plinkplonk 10y agoIs this for real? Wow. Reads like someone spoofing the real Google interview. For "Director of Engineering" they have a technical illiterate (nothing wrong with that, in other contexts) check for literal matches of answers? the mind boggles. (I'm really having a hard time believing this is for real)
- asimuvPR 10y agoI've had somewhat similar experience with other big companies. People wonder why I hate to change jobs.
- cookiecaper 10y agoBelieve it. The depths of corporate absurdity know few bounds.
- DannyBee 10y agoOn what data are you basing this?
- spb 10y agoThere's no reason to sealion this, but here's a recent article that talks about exactly this topic: https://aeon.co/essays/you-don-t-have-to-be-stupid-to-work-here-but-it-helps https://aeon.co/essays/you-don-t-have-to-be-stupid-to-work-h...
- reitanqild 10y agoPossibly same as everyone else: Been applying for a few jobs over the years ;-)
- spb 10y agoThis is a phone screen - the test they make you answer before they take the time to schedule actual interviews.
- etjossem 10y agoDirector of Engineering is a soft-skills position that involves communicating with a lot of non-technical people. It doesn't surprise me at all that the initial screen would be a conversation with a non-technical person.
- lordnacho 10y agoI'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. You end up with stupid discussions like the one about Quicksort. If you point out qs is one of several things with the same big-O, you'll probably also get it "wrong". But the real problem is that a guy who is just reading off a sheet can't give any form of nuanced feedback. Was the guy blagging the sort algo question? Did he know if in detail? Does he know what the current state of research on that area is? There's no way to know that if your guy is just a recruiter, but I'm sure even a relatively junior coder would be able to tell if someone was just doing technical word salad. I wonder what would happen if ordinary people recruited for medical doctor jobs? Would you be comfortable rejecting a guy who'd been in medical school for 10 years based on his not knowing what the "funny bone" is? Wouldn't you tell your boss that you felt a bit out of that league? It's amazing you can get someone to do this without them going red in the face.
- drewg123 10y agoIt tends to be incredibly helpful to know details like the length of a mac address and what tcp flags mean what if you're looking at an unformatted memory dump. One example of how this can be handy is when doing low-level NIC bring up, I've read PCIe TLPs from a logic analyzer to correlate them to network traffic.
- tptacek 10y ago
- DrNuke 10y agoIt was not the answers but the cultural fit ehehe...
- venomsnake 10y agoI feel sudden brick wall awaits in a recruiter career path once the google people read that. Not only because of that interview, but the questions transforms into - who else have we missed from the great guys ...
- plinkplonk 10y agoHaving had some experience with big companies, I doubt that. They'll probably just write this guy off as being 'non googley' or whatever, and keep on keeping on. (assuming the interview really went down this way. Which I have a hard time believing)
- 77pt77 10y agoDoubt it. This is a pretty standard google first interview. Nothing out of the ordinary. The recruiter will not suffer for following standard proceeding.
- mherdeg 10y agoHa ha re: > 10. what is the type of the packets exchanged to establish a TCP connection? > Me: in hexadecimal: 0x02, 0x12, 0x10 – literally "synchronize" and "acknowledge". > Recruiter: wrong, it's SYN, SYN-ACK and ACK; if Google is down you will need to know this to diagnose what the problem is. We will stop here because it's obvious that you don't have the necessary skills to write or review network applications. You should learn the Linux function calls, how the TCP/IP stack works, and what big-O means to eventually qualify if you are interviewed at a later time. Good luck, bye. That's embarrassing.
- StreamBright 10y agoAre you surprised though? If a person who does not have the merit to judge the answers very well this is what happens.
- Tempest1981 10y agoSurprising they wouldn't have given the recruiter a list of alternate acceptable answers. Almost feels like the recruiter was conspiring against you, but why?
- drzaiusapelord 10y agoWhy the hell is a non-technical recruiter giving these tests? Google engineers or managers should be administering it, not the high school dropouts who make up the recruiting industry. There's so much wiggle room here that have a rote-memorization style test for engineering is completely crazy. I've never had a technical test given to me by a recruiting firm. Its always a call with someone from the company, if not the hiring manager. Perhaps this is what they give to 'second string' applications to make HR happy while the guys who actually get the jobs are friends of the hiring manager or team leads. Or its a H1B ploy to say, "See Obama, we need tech talent. Look how terrible our domestic talent is. They score 40% on our tests!" Meanwhile Bombay Upstairs University has a wink-wink-nudge-nudge deal with Google hiring managers who accidentally leak the test on a 'forgotten' ftp site. Everything about this is fishy. I think there's fraud here, not just incompetence. I've been the hiring stooge for shops who have already made their decisions before and its always terrible and, frankly, hurtful. These are the signs of a non-serious 'stooge' interview.
- mrits 10y agoI would have stopped you half way through. You obviously know enough to move on.
- fasteo 10y agoThis reminds me of the infamous Nigerian emails. They are so obvious for a reason - avoiding false positives - [1]. Cannot fit this same scheme in a Senior position recruitment at Google though. [1] http://uk.businessinsider.com/why-nigerian-scam-emails-are-obvious-2014-5?r=US&IR=T http://uk.businessinsider.com/why-nigerian-scam-emails-are-o...
- olalonde 10y ago> This reminds me of the infamous Nigerian emails. They are so obvious for a reason - avoiding false positives Unrelated to the main topic but I wonder if email providers could effectively fight those scammers by having chatbots automatically reply to their emails. That would make a bunch of false positive to sort through and possibly make the whole thing uneconomical for the scammers.
- bhc 10y agoAre they hiring a reference manual or a director of engineering?
- danceparty 10y agoHaving been through several goog interviews I find it hard to believe that the interviewer would dismiss his highly technical explanations/rebuttals in that way. Seems more likely this is his interpretation of the tone of the interview, rather than a transcript.
- johan_larson 10y agoThe meta-question is, "Do you have the social savvy to give the conventional answers when being judged by someone who doesn't know what he is taking about?"
- barkingcat 10y agoYah I get the feeling you're supposed to "act stupid" so you can get to the next interview. Definitely not an idea way of getting candidates - you are selecting for people who know how to manipulate screens (and thus increasing the risk of getting a bad candidate), or rejecting otherwise knowledgeable people who just don't have the time/inclination/"social savvy" to pretend to be stupid.
- geofft 10y agoWhy not? Especially in a managerial position, you will occasionally need to build a rapport with people who are convinced they have good technical knowledge, but don't. Being able to talk to them productively instead of picking fights is a skill worth selecting for. If you can't figure out that the first person who's interviewing you has answers on a sheet of paper and you're supposed to parrot them until you get to the second person, how are you ever going to figure out that the first person you're selling to has some business requirements on a sheet of paper and you'll never get to the second person until you parrot those? "Oh, we're not actually using Docker, we're using rkt, which is a compatible reimplementation of --" "I'm sorry, I've been told Docker is a requirement. We can't use your Cuber Netty thing until you support it. Bye!"
- barkingcat 10y agoIt's totally dependent on the type of person being interviewed. There is a difference between "knowing how to work in a team" "knowing when to be civil, when to push, when to go to battle", and wanting to parrot answers in order to just get to the next step. If it were me, I'd try to engage with the recruiter and make them go completely off book. I'd ask them about their career, and try to find a different job for them (instead of reading stuff off a sheet of paper), or if that's what they are content to do, try to escalate and get them to reveal their "client" or "person they report to" (which in recuiting is a no-no) - I think I have the confidence and social skills to try to do that (I've talked past border officials, and various recruiters, and having been in a tele-job where I had to follow a script, I know exactly where a script reader is most likely to go off book if I ask something at exactly the right time). I am in no way qualified for a director of engineering position, but I can very easily get past this telephone screening, because precisely I've been the person asking this kind of question and using this kind of script. If I got past this screening, I'd be wasting the time of the person next in line for the interview. Of course, it is a valid strategy to get an interviewee to follow along, but it's misguided - using the entirely wrong tool (scripted questions/answers) for doing the job (finding someone with managerial and people talent).
- cookiecaper 10y agoMost people, at every level, are terrible at interviewing and hiring, and in fact a surprising number are conscious of that fact. As a candidate, you just have to know this going in, and expect to be made to jump through a lot of irrelevant/stupid hoops. Eventually you find someone who is adequately amused by your performance to give you a chance and hire you. I don't think the recruitment industry is going anywhere anytime soon. I just wish there were some worthwhile recruiters in it (out of the dozens and dozens of recruiters I've dealt with, I've met one who is semi-competent (which is to say, not fully competent)). This is an area I'd love to try to startup in, I don't think any of the startups I know about are doing it right.
- arekkas 10y agoA friend of mine was offered a similar position and had a similar interview. Annoyed by the questions and the "my solution is the only right one because I have to stick to this script"-attitude he asked: "So what do you want me to do at Google, how can I help you" the recruiter could not really answer and ended the call shortly after.
- eternalban 10y agoIt's a freaking psychological profile test dressed up as "tech screen". Your friend's personality was effectively filtered. IMO, the very first step in entering googleplex/facebook is accepting that it is OK to lend your talents to build a global surveillance & propaganda platform. These tests seem to be probing for other desired characteristics as the next step.
- phuangcn 10y agoYou can fire this Director of Engineering.
- ohitsdom 10y agoIt is scary if this is how Google hires engineering directors. Passing this test would select all the bad candidates! Answers to many technical solutions are "it depends". If you have a director that "knows" the right answer, they won't be very likely to encourage their engineers to experiment and find the best solution to the specific problem at hand.
- JorgeGT 10y agoA brilliant professor of mine liked to say "The Answer of the Engineer: it depends".
- ksec 10y agoThat is nearly the answer i give to every questions. But when i asked for more detail no one likes it. They all simply want "answers". Well much like most things in life, there is no such thing as concrete answer.
- bostik 10y agoI keep pushing the message that getting a "correct[tm]" answer to a technical question is probably not the answer you should be looking for. Problem solving skill trumps rote knowledge every time. I recently wrote a somewhat lengthy post on the subject, after realising how bad some companies are at this: https://smarketshq.com/notes-on-interviewing-engineers-a4fa4383968a https://smarketshq.com/notes-on-interviewing-engineers-a4fa4...
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- anilgulecha 10y agoThis is what happens when a non-technical person conducts a technical interview. Though I'm surprised this happened for a Google interview. Their recruitment workflow should now have allowed this to occur.
- phuangcn 10y agoYou can fire this Director of Engineering.
- maverick_iceman 10y agoThis is very hard to believe. In most big tech companies technical interviews are conducted by technical people, not recruiters. Especially for a senior role like Director of Eng. the experience described here stretches credulity. Also most of these companies have policies which don't allow any feedback to be given on interview performance. In light of that the recruiter saying "you don't have necessary skills" is extremely surprising.
- johan_larson 10y agoI've never interviewed for director-level positions, but I have definitely received a few technical questions from recruiters who didn't seem technical. The questions were generally easy. I still think it's a bad practice, though. If you absolutely insist on doing so, multiple choice is the right way to go.
- teej 10y agoThis wasn't a technical interview. This was a phone screen. As dumb as it is, having non-technical recruiters do a "technical" phone screen like this is increasingly common. I don't think this practice is completely justifiable, but part of the root cause is the enormous volume of grossly underqualified people who apply for any particular position. It takes a hiring company a large amount of work to vet a candidate but it takes a candidate nearly 0 effort to apply for a job.
- chrissnell 10y agoIt's standard practice at the Googles and Facebooks of the world to have a recruiter lob a bunch of canned questions at you during a phone screen, including Director-level phone screens. My experience was a lot different that the writer's, however. The recruiter was friendly and I was friendly back. I think I missed one or two but still went on to the next round. This guy comes across sounding like a pompous asshole and I wouldn't want him as my Director of Engineering, either.
- throwaway76543 10y agoMany companies do a pre-interview screen performed by recruiters to filter obviously bad candidates. I have personally helped construct such screens -- though not at google. Ensuring the recruiter understands the difference between an answer over their head and a wrong answer is crucial. What we did was to make sure the recruiters understood that answers they didn't understand needed to be surfaced to someone in engineering for a sanity check. Often our strongest candidates would give an answer which recruiting wasn't capable of vetting. The key is making everyone aware that the answers may not fit the script, and that this is OK. Recruiters shouldn't be judging the technical details of an answer; they should be looking for "gosh I don't know I've never seen that." Pre-screening is sadly necessary when doing high volume recruiting. There are a LOT of people out there who grossly inflate their competency.
- enjoylife 10y agoWhat the heck is a "Quicksort big-O score"? I've never heard anyone use the noun score when talking about complexity analysis.
- JorgeGT 10y ago"Order" would be the commonly used term, right? At least in my native language.
- protomyth 10y agoI assume they want the average O(n log n), but who the heck knows given the script from above. I get the feeling this: http://bigocheatsheet.com http://bigocheatsheet.com would come in handy
- steven777400 10y agoBig-O technically means "worst case", which for Quicksort is O(n^2), although usually (in normal cases) it runs better than that. Other sort algorithms can guarantee not worse than O(n log n).
- protomyth 10y agoMust have been a while, I thought you went with average, but I guess its been 20 years. I mostly lived in optimizing cache since college.
- susi22 10y agoThat's incorrect. The /mathematical/ definition means that it's the upper bound. I.e. yes, the set of all functions of O(N) is a subset of the set of all functions O(N^2). So you could say Quicksort is O(N^100) and still be technically correct. However, the big-O notation does NOT specify anything about worst/avg/best-case complexity of a given algorithm. That should still be defined in the analysis. You mixed up those two slightly different concepts.
- TimonKnigge 10y agoDepending on how the pivot is picked, Quicksort can actually be implemented in O(n lg n) worst-case time. EDIT: I was going to link a proof for this but it's surprisingly hard to find. IIRC, the idea is to use the median of medians algorithm ([1]) to pick the median for the pivot, and deal with values equal to the pivot by alternatingly placing them in the left and right partition, or alternatively just keep them in a third partition in the middle. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_of_medians https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_of_medians
- nurettin 10y agoPerhaps they are looking for a pointy-haired-boss type rather than someone who actually knows his thing.
- clifanatic 10y agoSorry, 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 you sure you wouldn't be more interested in our technical architecture team? You sound like a good fit for our technical architecture team".
- nurettin 10y agoThing 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".
- gautamdivgi 10y agoHehehe - that's really funny. Why did they even need a "body" behind the test? If all the person is doing is reading from script - it could have been just web based.
- carsongross 10y agoHere's the good news: Google will get the directors of engineering they deserve.
- powera 10y agoAs a person who's taken this exact same test: 1) it's a pre-screen from an in-house recruiter. If you have 37 years of experience with computers and 24 years professional experience and any references/reputation, they should have skipped you straight to an phone interview with an engineer. 2) Were you recording the interview? Because if it's an accurate transcript the recruiter should be fired. I assume question 7 was actually "give the Big-O of Quicksort", if you refused the recruiter might have assumed you didn't know it and were trying to BS through the interview. If the recruiter was too stupid to ask, once that person is fired you'll get a new recruiter. Google is (was?) notorious for contacting the same candidates every six months regardless of previous interviews.
- chillingeffect 10y ago> they should have skipped you straight to an phone interview with an engineer. When a family member of mine used to be an admissions officer at a small tech school, "unsuitable" (mentally ill, ppl who seemed like they would never get in, be able to pay or complain and tarnish the reputation of the school) used to come in often. They were given a screening test which was waived for all "normies." This is how power works. It is not fair. With communication media like the internet, we're starting to perceive it. The real challenge will be re-architecting our society to be more fair and clean up from the aftermath of our unfairness.
- endtime 10y agoI've been at Google for five years as a SWE and I've been interviewing for 3 of those. I'd fail this pop quiz. This strikes me as bizarre and inconsistent with all the practices I'm aware of. The idea that we'd ask anyone this stuff, let alone director candidates, strains belief.
- brazzledazzle 10y agoThis seems like a pre-screen where the recruiter is trying to assess the viability of a candidate themselves. But I would assume that based on experience with recruiters elsewhere, no idea if Google has a higher bar for their recruiters.
- SomeCallMeTim 10y agoI only have a sample size of one, but I blew threw a phone interview with Google about a year ago -- and the guy giving it was very technically skilled. We talked about the subtler aspects of the questions as we went. They offered an in-person interview, of course, but I declined when I found out that they were only hiring for Google Payments in Boulder. I'm sure the job has interesting aspects, and maybe my imagination just isn't up to the task, but I have a hard time figuring out how I wouldn't go insane with boredom working on a system that just moves money around, not to mention frustration from working with the extra regulatory/process restrictions that must be in place to keep compliance up...
- mooreds 10y agoI know someone working in that area--apparently lots of string parsing. It's vitally important (moving money usually is) but not very exciting/cutting edge (moving money usually isn't--after all, it's an old technology).
- SomeCallMeTim 10y agoImportant? Absolutely. But I do games, apps, machine learning, IoT, hardware drivers, and deep dives into broken code that no one knows how to fix. Fancy accounting software didn't doesn't strike me as interesting. Even if it involves string parsing. :)
- jdc0589 10y agowow, thats especially terrible. The engineering interview pre-screen I had at Amazon was better than that. Can't imagine why a company would do this for ANY technical position, much less such a senior one. I did have an HR pre-screen one time where they sent me a SQL literacy test (did not specify sql dialect). One of the multiple choice questions had all correct answers, in different sql dialects, with no "all of the above" option. I corrected the test. I did not get a call back.
- jussij 10y agoIf this is true, then it's not surprising as usually the person asking the question is not up to speed on the details of the question being asked. I recall a question, which was how do you stop a socket from overflowing? I said what do you mean? If you write to a socket and it fails to accept the write it will fail. Sockets do not have any option to stop this. Naturally I failed the question yet I asked for the correct answer and was told the answer is simple, just use a cache. Nice answer, excepts sockets do not have caches. Correct Answer: Add a cache to the socket to stop them failing but that was not the question. While that answer is obvious, it was not the question asked!!
- middleca 10y agoGoogle and all the other mega-tech corps do a similar tech phone screen where they're reading off an answer sheet. (powers of 2, sort these functions, linux kernel calls, etc). Sounds like you dodged a bullet, this sort of thing speaks volumes to how the company is run internally and how you'd be treated there.
- adekok 10y agoI'm reminded of a story about Einstein in the 1930s. The fad at the time was to have a "skills test" which was supposed to place you perfectly according to your results. Einstein took the test, and did terribly. Everyone was shocked, and asked him what was going on. His response was "The questions tested memorization. Why would I remember what the capital of North Dakota is? I can look that up in a book!" Perhaps unsurprisingly, the tests faded out of popularity. It's sad that 100 years later, even Google hasn't learned that lesson.
- drvdevd 10y agoPerhaps, as of yet, Google isn't living fully by their own principles ("automating themselves out of a job"), maybe because the tech isn't quite there yet or maybe for other reasons. It remains to be seen if the ultimate solution to bureaucracy is AI/ML or if it will just be a further extension of these same mechanisms. The problem with simple "skills tests" is they lack depth, and of necessity due to time, always will. The problem with performance tests is the opposite: they may take too long to reach a conclusion in human terms, during which time significant money is lost. Recruiters seem like a great candidate for replacement by AI. [edit: and I should add, most middle managers too]
- andrewvijay 10y agoI'm feeling a bit confident looking at the questions. Woo.
- arturadib 10y agoPretty sure Google's interview questions are under NDA.. Brave!
- sonoffett 10y agoThis sounds like a phone screen--i've never signed an NDA for phone screens or at any stage of the interview process for that matter.
- Robin_Message 10y agoI can see both sides here. Google does want to make sure even higher up technical hires have good technical skills, which I think most developers would agree is a good idea. But their way of measuring this (the standard way) is bad, because it ignores the nuance a more experienced person has (seen so clearly here). On the gripping hand, I can't help but feel the candidate did demonstrate a big failure to communicate, which is an important skill in itself. For example, listing SYN, SYN-ACK, ACK in hexadecimal is great for showing off, but is legitimately a bad answer to the question – as evidenced by the lack of understanding in the questioner. I also think some social graces might have got them further (e.g. "Oh yeah, sure. Quicksort is O(N log N on average, and is generally a reasonable sort to chose, but I wanted to mention some other factors that are worth considering"). At the end of the day: - it's a hoop. Jump through it and get a fish, or don't. - calibrate for your audience! This is a very important technical skill (and this test was unintentionally correct in its result IMHO).
- swaraj 10y agoCompletely agree with you. Seems more like a personality mismatch, than a lack of technical skills. Seems like both parties were at fault here: - The interviewee for being a little brusque about his answers, and despite understanding the _intention_ of the question, giving potentially off-putting, difficult answers to check over a quick phone call. - Google recruiter for seeming to ask questions she/he was a little out of her/his league to ask. If you don't understand the nuances in and around the questions you're asking, you are not qualified to evaluate someone's responses. Wouldn't worry about any one particular interview, there are too many great opportunities in tech right now to let any one bad interview let you down!
- joesmo 10y ago"4. sort the time taken by: CPU register read, disk seek, context switch, system memory read. Me: CPU register read, system memory read, context switch, disk seek. Recruiter: right." This is the exact question I got in a phone screen (although mine included CPU caches so was actually harder) for the lowest level SRE position at Google. That and the obvious lack of knowledge of their interviewer, who I'd expect to know these answers inside and out, point to Google lowering the bar extensively not only on their interviewing practices (where it certainly was never high as in quality) but on the actual quality of their hires. Any SRE could be Director of Engineering at Google, apparently, going by this test. I'd say that equates to not having a bar at all.
- danharaj 10y agoMediocre people can't evaluate exceptional people. What mediocre people think is knowledgeable can't be exceptional knowledge, by definition. If you want to find exceptional directors of engineering, you need an exceptional person worthy of being director of engineering to evaluate them. In seeking victory, not going beyond what everyone knows / is not skilled. Victory in battle that all-under-heaven calls skilled / is not skilled. Thus lifting an autumn hair does not mean / great strength. Seeing the sun and moon does not mean a / clear eye. Hearing thunder does not mean a keen ear. So-called skill is to be victorious over the easily / defeated. Thus the battles of the skilled are without / extraordinary victory, without reputation for / wisdom and without merit for courage. - Sun Tzu Ch. 4 (Denma translation)
- noploop 10y agoBullshit. If Pierre was actually smart he would be able to judge the level of the interviewer and give the answers required. And if he had any self confidence at all he wouldn't have the need to boast about this on his blog.
- danharaj 10y agoI... disagree? Like? The questions were OK questions, it was the answers that were asinine and clearly not meant to gauge anything except the ability to skim wikipedia pages about computer science.
- protomyth 10y agoThe Google person's response to the answer in question 5 would have pretty much ended the call with "can I talk to an actual engineer as you are doing poor keyword searches on my answers". I do admit to hearing the "I will stab you" voice in my head on that one[1]. This reflects really badly on Google. Plus the answer on question 8 is the best worded answer to using big-O improperly I have seen. 1) http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=I%20will%20stab%20you http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=I%20will%20st...
- sonoffett 10y agoquicksort is O(n^2) which is definitely not the "best big-O" for sorting.
- pkaye 10y agoQuicksort is O(n log n) average and O(n^2) worst case. Heapsort is O(n log n) for both average and worst case.
- sonoffett 10y ago"how do you count the bits most efficiently?" What does this even mean?
- UK-AL 10y agoWhat i think he means is counting the amount of set(1) bits in the array,
- sonoffett 10y agoThanks, the question makes more sense now :)
- dekhn 10y agoIf you have a collection of data, and you want to know the number of 1 bits, and you want to do it with a minimum of resources... what is the process? For example, standard bit-shifting and masking the lowest bit to set a counter is one way to do this. Possibly there are other, faster ways, such as using a lookup table (a byte or more can be "counted" at a time). Of course, because so many people were doing this, intel added a popcnt instruction which probably is more efficient (faster) than either of the above, at the expense of more CPU real estate, heat, etc. Turns out counting 1 bits in a dataset is a super-important problem that shows up in a lot of situations.
- Jiig 10y agoIts worst case is O(n^2) sure, so heap sort would be better if you know that your data would hit the worst case scenario of quick sort every time.
- wnevets 10y agoI really hope this isnt real.
- mankash666 10y ago"Recruiter: wrong, it's SYN, SYN-ACK and ACK; if Google is down you will need to know this to diagnose what the problem is. We will stop here because it's obvious that you don't have the necessary skills to write or review network applications. " Because when Google is down, it's typically upper management that fixes network issues. CEO level to directors of engineering are on pager duty most nights there.
- mooreds 10y agoMay I assume this is tongue in cheek?
- mankash666 10y agoAbsolutely not. The reason so many Google upper management types sport beards (case in point, Sundar Pichai), is the chronic lack of time from working nights as data-center technicians/network engineers. How else can you explain Google's up-time and low-latency? :)
- mooreds 10y agoRight. Who has time to shave when you're busy examining network traffic?
- philjr 10y agoWithout actually hearing the transcript verbatim, it's hard to give much enlightened perspective here, but there's a lot of "hur hur, dumb recruiter" responses here. What I will say, in general, is that figuring out what the "right" answers are here for what is obviously a technical phone screen by a non-technical person with answers on a piece of paper is also part of the challenge. This is a Director of Engineering interview. Understanding context & navigating "real people", having soft skills etc. is meant to be part of the job description. Feels like this gentlemen couldn't turn the hardcore engineer off who's technically right about everything but yet never seems to get anyone to listen to him. Giving the hexadecimal representations of the 3-way handshake... really? You may have gotten a dumb recruiter and you may think you're smart, but from my perspective, you answered the questions in a pretty dumb way given the context of non-technical recruiter, very obviously reading answers from a sheet of paper. I've done two of these before and I've often said "Oh well, it might be down on your sheet at this thing" and the recruiter goes "Ah, yeh, that's it. Tick" and moved through 3-4 questions that in theory I might have gotten wrong. If you take the "be a dick" routine... Congrats. You won the moral war. Best of luck with your next job.
- pgrote 10y agoHow were the answers stated to the recruiter being a dick? There was no room to a be a dick given the recruiter was looking for verbatim scripted answers.
- edanm 10y agoI more or less agree, although the real wrong party here is Google, for putting a non-technical recruiter asking a quiz as a step. This story does sound bizarre though, very unlike Google.
- dkonofalski 10y agoWhy is that wrong? As a Director, you'd have to deal with people at all different levels of understanding. You may even have to deal with companies, clients, and other departments that have zero skill in your area of expertise. This seems like the perfect exercise to test someone's ability to navigate those kinds of required skills.
- Tempest1981 10y agoOn #9, is it 16-bit or 64-bit values? Sounds like you may have been answering a different question. Isn't the standard answer to use a 65536 entry lookup table? Edit: oh, are you reinterpreting the array of 10000 16-bit integers as 2500 64-bit integers? But then what operation do you use on each? Either way, if you find yourself arguing with the recruiter, it's probably a bad sign.
- greyman 10y ago> Isn't the standard answer to use a 65536 entry lookup table? Yes, it is, but is it such a common knowledge?
- landhar 10y agoI thought the reason it was generally accepted that the 8-bit lookup table is optimal is because it can fit in the L1 cache.
- a_imho 10y agoBut can he invert a binary tree?
- mgkimsal 10y agoHave had similar phone screen experiences for various roles, and sometimes the screener seemed to understand that I had a lot more knowledge/experience they did, and trusted my explanations, because I'd talk to them some more and explain the answer (their answer) in more detail back to them. Some of them may have thought I was completely BSing them, but a few seemed to grok I was more than qualified based on the answers and put me through. Also took a computer-based test at a recruiter once, re: PHP, and it was... 20 questions. One of the questions was wrong, in that the syntax of the question as posted was incorrect. Pointed that out, and got a "thank you, we'll call you" kick out the door.
- StreamBright 10y agoThis is epic. Why would not Google just give a written test and not use a recruiter for this? I do not see the point.
- laxatives 10y agoI had very similar intervies at Palantir and Yelp, albeit Yelp was understandably just a quick phone screen with a recruiter. However, the "trivia" interview at Palantir came from a forward deployed engineer on the DC based team I was interested in working with and one of my last hour long, onsite interviews of the day. Seemed like a big red flag at the time.
- clifanatic 10y ago> the "trivia" interview at Palantir ... Seemed like a big red flag at the time. Besides the bigger red flag that it was Palantir, you mean.
- laxatives 10y agoNo, at the time Palantir was mine and a lot of other people's too choice at Berkeley. They spent a ton of money on recruiting my class and I went there for dinner/lunch several times.
- jblow 10y ago#9 is especially stupid because it's so context-dependent. SSE4 gives you a popcount instruction, for example, which would be easily the fastest way to do this, if available.
- mortehu 10y agoWhich is why you ask follow-up questions instead of just giving the optimal solution for UltraSPARC and rejecting what would be the optimal solution for other CPUs.
- greyman 10y agoYes, but without that instruction, the algorithm mentioned by recruiter is really the quickest way. I coded chess algorithm in the past and this was exactly the method top chess open-source engines used. But imho it is hard to figure that out without prior experience with this problem.
- monocasa 10y agoYep. Went and tried the lookup method against a 5 step parallel shift and add method (which is the fastest bitwise way I know of without, and the lookup is ~5% faster than the bitwise way. https://gist.github.com/monocasa/1d44a03cbd0170bfffc6a4a5c37b2210 https://gist.github.com/monocasa/1d44a03cbd0170bfffc6a4a5c37...
- gcp 10y ago
- gjem97 10y agoTo be charitable here: is it possible that this person did not work for Google? Historically, I've known third-party recruiters play fast and loose with their affiliation with the company they're recruiting for. This literally could have been any recruiter in the Valley trying to feed candidates to Google.
- kkapelon 10y agoNo, I have been asked the same questions by a person with @google.com email address that clearly said he was a psychologist and not a technical guy. His Linked in info at the time was Google Recruiter.
- ryandrake 10y agoKnowing the right answer, or when "it depends", is not the expectation. You need to get inside the mind of the interviewer and figure out what he/she thinks is the right answer is, or guess what's probably written on the answer sheet. Think: "What answer would a know-it-all 23-year-old Stanford graduate give?" That, and not necessarily the right answer, is what will get you the job offer. This is also called "cultural fit".
- v64 10y agoI was with you until the end. Instead of cultural fit, I would call it "a stupid way to hire".
- samfisher83 10y agoWhile there is a notion that devs are in demand for a company like google they have so many candidates that can be dicks to people and get away with it.
- jbyers 10y agoThis is 75% similar to a phone screen I passed (somewhat surprisingly, in hindsight) in 2003-2004. I don't think this is a director-level test, it's just a coarse engineer-track filter.
- eternalban 10y agoI would agree with "metadata" answer being correct. "Each inode stores the attributes and disk block location(s) of the filesystem object's data." [1] A file's "attributes" are independent of its storage. One could also argue the notion that a FS object's ACL are attributes of the file. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inode https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inode
- clifanatic 10y agoExcept that anybody who actually does understand what an inode is and what it's for would say exactly what OP said.
- glandium 10y agoNo, because OP is describing an inode number, not an inode.
- boo_ 10y agoEarly in my career I got asked a question about database reporting on sales items and totaling the number by a given date. This was one of the hardest questions I was ever given because I had to "write" the sql out over the phone and was not given a schema so I had to make one up as I went. I was then asked how I would go about writing one that included $0 sales days. At the time I didn't know the answer to this -- just that querying for something that doesn't exist is not straight forward in sql. I explained that I didn't work much with reporting so I had not encountered this solution before and gave a list of possible answers: * Generate a complete list of dates in memory and see which do not exist. * Create a temporary table to match it up that way. * Do post-processing on the report. * Research prior art. I was not offered the job. Years later I was given the task of creating a "data warehouse" to enable easy reporting by business analysts so they could stop bothering the engineering team. So, it being the first time I had done this, I read up on different techniques. I solved the problem the previous interviewer proposed by have a table of dates with attributes on them (is weekend, is national holiday, day of week, etc) and all dates foreign key to this table. However, because I couldn't think of this solution within a few minutes -- despite it not being in my background -- I did not get the original job from years before. In many ways, I'm thankful the original interviewer passed upon me. I was able to get a different job that valued being able to think of creative solutions AND being able to research prior art so we don't invent a badly designed wheel over and over again. I suspect the author of this article will experience the same feeling with time and it is a real shame companies are valuing root memorization and keyword matching over real problem solving skills.
- Jdam 10y agoWow, I had almost the very same set of questions for a junior SRE role! The difference is: I graduated ~1 year ago and therefore have a lot less experience than this guy. It was kinda funny, the recruiter called me to "go through some of the questions to see what I will encounter in the actual interview". I remember, when asked about what Unix function accepts connections on a socket I could just answer "dunno", because I never used or did that. Even more funny if you consider that they actually came across my profile and called me initially and there is just no place in my CV where I claim such "low-level" knowledge. I also remember that Inode question, "What is stored in an Inode?" - Again "idk" and the answer the recruiter gave was "metadata". Yes of course metadata, goddammit, what else? (Can an answer really be that simple???) After the interview I felt quite devastated because I did not expect that I had to come up with a solution to process an array with the size of 10,000 in a call with the recruiter. I wasn't (and I'm still not) sure if this was only preparation or an actual interview. In the latter case, I was sure that I failed. Surprisingly however, I was invited to an actual engineering interview some time later.
- dx034 10y agoMaybe they wanted to test your personality and if you generally have a clue. Admitting to not know something is usually no deal breaker as long as you get the important ones right and show the right attitude.
- loeg 10y agoHe's confused an inode (file object) with an inode number (the index). But who cares? This is not a useful interview question. His confusion carries over to the stat question, because he's still thinking an inode is just an index. That said, I wouldn't describe stat() as returning an inode, either... it fills a stat struct. That's all. Inodes can have more or less information than is present in the standard stat structure. If this is how Google interviews director candidates, they've really gone downhill since I last tried to interview there in 2011 or so.
- vintageseltzer 10y agoI realize they have enough applicants not to care, but constantly reading this kind of thing about Google makes me never want to apply to work there. It sounds like they took the worst parts of a startup, graduate research lab, corporation and bank and put them all together, but they have enough advertising $ that it doesn't really matter.
- odammit 10y agoOnce in an interview for a web developer role I was asked to list the layers of the OSI model. As I rattled off the layers the guy looked super surprised and asked how I remembered them and I said "pretty dicks never touch shitty people's assholes." Needless to say, I got the job.
- aviraldg 10y agoI would be extremely offended if I was in his position and an HR-bot (both literally and figuratively) wasted my time with an interview process like this.
- gmarx 10y ago"There's an array of 10,000 16-bit values, how do you count the bits most efficiently?" multiply 10,000 by 16. There are 160,000 bits
- biocomputation 10y agoMy sarcastic reply is to your very reasonable answer is: On the x86 architecture, integer multiplies take more cycles than a comparable solution that uses bit twiddling so you're just WRONG! You are the weakest link, GOODBYE!
- gmarx 10y agoI get that but I am proposing to hard code the answer since I already know it
- yongjik 10y agoNo no no, this is Google. You must start a MapReduce, or whatever replaced it these days.
- eco 10y agoFrankly, this reads like a post from /r/ThatHappened. For those unfamiliar, it's a subreddit to share social media posts from people telling obviously made up stories with the purpose of making themselves look good (e.g., brave student stands up to intolerant teacher, receives standing ovation from peers). The interview may have happened and the questions may be accurate but the story is very exaggerated to make the person look good (and the interviewer look bad).
- urda 10y agoThis definitely fails a basic "smell test", I don't think the author has the most honest intentions at all.
- DannyBee 10y agoFWIW: 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 engineering, but they decided to interview him for a different level/job instead. But it's super-strange even then (i've literally reviewed thousands of hiring packets, phone screens, etc, and this is ... out there. I'm not as familiar with SRE hiring practices, admittedly, though i've reviewed enough SRE candidates to know what kind of questions they ask). As for the answers themselves, i always take "transcripts" of interviews (or anything else) with a grain of salt, as there are always two sides to every story. 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".
- mkagenius 10y agoHa!
- anuj_nm 10y agoI was asked pretty much the same questions for an SRE position at Google. Note that I only found the recruiter phone screen to be this kind of 'pop quiz'. The engineering interviews were more detailed discussions with engineers.
- jnbiche 10y agoOn one hand you say that these are "bog-standard" SRE questions, and on the other you say it's "super strange". What exactly is super strange? That a non-technical recruiter asked the questions? If that's not the strange part, then surely it's believable that the recruiter would not recognize some of the subtleties involved? That said, if this guy is the creator of GWAN, then it's entirely possible that his personality rubbed someone the wrong way and he was nixed for "personality reasons" in the only way they could.
- dewiz 10y agoif this is Pierre, I remember some controversial discussions years back. Some links: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4113514 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4113514 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4109698 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4109698 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8130849 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8130849
- fatihky 10y agoI am not him, if you ask this.
- mk-61 10y agoFeels like overqualification for that position.
- leshow 10y agoGoogle 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.
- brohee 10y agoThe phone screen is like that, albeit in my case with an interviewer that could adapt a lot more, even if not technical himself.
- joss82 10y agoI 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.
- kkapelon 10y agoIt does. I have already said it in another thread, but I have been asked the exact same questions at Google (applying for a Java developer job) Several other people have come out and said the same.
- Tempest1981 10y agoNew theory: maybe it was a psychological test, to see how you would react in a difficult situation.
- AlexCoventry 10y agoIsn't a Director of Engineering meant to be an interface between engineers and the rest of the organization? Perhaps this was more like a smoke test for the political insight such a role calls for, not the ostensible test of technical skill it was presented as. After the first couple of wrong answers, people with the right social skills to manage others and represent their interests to the broader organization would stop striving to prove their technical chops, clarify what kinds of answers the test is looking for, and adjust their subsequent answers accordingly.
- dkonofalski 10y agoI think this is exactly what they're looking for and what half of the people in this thread are missing. Someone else mentioned that they also had this interview and remembered these questions and that the person doing the interview told them he was a psychologist. Why would they be doing a technical interview with a psychologist? This was a skills interview for sure but it wasn't the skills that most of these people are assuming.
- monocasa 10y ago> Why would they be doing a technical interview with a psychologist? Because every psychology major I knew from college either went back and got a masters in a different subject, or is working at Home Depot. They'd kill for a $12/hr job.
- dordoka 10y agoI actually believe they rejected him because he didn't show proper people/social skills. The tone of the post, forgetting the part about his resume, looks like it's written by an angry teenager.
- jazzyk 10y agoI have been in similar roles (Software Architect , CTO) where I had to explain to non-technical, but impatient (or pissed off) people (CEO, VCs) technical concepts and judgement calls. But I knew in advance they were not technical. Also, a CEO would not challenge my explanation of what algorithm to use for sorting, be real :-)
- InclinedPlane 10y agoThis reads as an indictment of the entire hiring culture of the tech industry, which it is. Hiring is one of the most important things any company ever does. It's also one of the biggest opportunities to attain a competitive advantage. And it's one of the most difficult tasks that any developer will ever participate in. And yet, consistently there is a lack of seriousness when it comes to hiring, and a reliance on bad, counterproductive cargo cult practices. It's not just embarrassing for this industry it has a big impact on the quality of life of developers and the quality of developer talent at companies. If you want to hire good people you need to put a lot of resources into it. And that means you can't just hand off these sorts of important tasks to interns who don't know what they're talking about. Hiring, even at the phone screen level, is not like comcast customer service, and any company that treats it that way is setting themselves up for failure.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- hvmonk 10y agoLooks like the other side was just a turing machine.
- gohrt 10y ago> What is the opposite function of malloc() in C? Google uses C++. Do they use malloc/free?
- gcp 10y agoGoogle makes extensive use of third party libraries. Some are in C.
- titomc 10y agoA "technical" recruiter asked me "how comfortable are you with 'tomcat' programming language". I said I am not at all comfortable with "tomcat" programming language because I have to invent one. He was furious and hung up.
- Kiro 10y agoBoth of them come off as really obnoxious. I highly doubt this is real though.
- sidazad 10y agoIf I were interviewing him and he gave those answers I'd definitely give him a second round and try to get him in.
- DelaneyM 10y agoFWIW: I have interviewed twice at Google for Dir. Eng. jobs, both times going the distance. (Once rejected after a few weeks, once received an offer two months later, too late to accept.) In those interviews, I was never asked a seriously hard technical question, let alone an annoyingly academic and trivial one such as those in this post. Rather, I felt like they did a pretty solid job of understanding how I would engage with the organization and perform in the role. Though the lack of technical rigor was not surprising in evaluating me for a administrative & support position, the lack thereof in the onsite portion was something I sent explicit feedback about afterwards.
- newsat13 10y agoInterviewing is a two way street. You have to be high enough in the food chain to be able to reject companies. Otherwise, you are going to just face such meaningless things over and over.
- geofft 10y ago7. what is the name of the KILL signal? Me: SIGKILL which #define is set to 9. Recruiter: no, it's "TERMINATE". Me: SIGTERM (15) is different from the KILL signal (9). Recruiter: that's not the answer I have on my sheet of paper. You know, I think I've been asked this question on a Google phone screen - and I think the question is specifically "What is the signal that the `kill` command sends?". The answer is in fact SIGTERM, not SIGKILL; if you want SIGKILL you need to specifically say `kill -KILL` or `kill -9`. If you insist that it's SIGKILL, you're just technically wrong. And if you can't understand the question, you're missing very important skills; this sort of confusion will cause actual production problems.
- gcp 10y agoGood catch, and a good indication that the author is paraphrasing and not exactly getting all the details right. (I don't doubt this happened, but we're only hearing one side of the story)
- manca 10y agoI believe the guy just talked with one of the non-tech recruiters from the agencies, not the actual Google employed recruiter. There are bunch of those non competent recruiters playing smart asses...
- manca 10y agoI believe the guy just talked with one of the non-tech recruiters from the agencies, not the actual Google employed recruiter. There are bunch of those non competent recruiters playing smart asses...
- jondot 10y agoI have interviewed many people, in large and small companies, and saw how interview processes get built in the wrong and right way. First, here's two reasons why interview processes suck. One, is that no one wants to help recruiting, or HR, do their job. Helping them is an errand and is done in a robotic way. You end up with an idiotic checklist that is a shame to great engineers. Second, is when the team finally realizes idiots joining the team are hurting the team - they will go about and have more motivation to support the recruitment process. Then, when you let a group of people devise such a task you get: an average process designed to leave out the human parts (shift bytes in array) and fit each person's interview style, or a crazy idiotic processes made by people mentally jerking off to each other (implement raft. in assembly). A team can be a company or an actual software development team. The right way to do it, is this. I believe a single person, who cares about developers, who is passionate about developer experience - should build his/her team's interview process. He/she can take feedback from the team, but that person should eventually build the process and make the calls. In this specific case I want to believe there is an accurate answer, and a correct answer, and they wanted the correct answer, or at least to see him negotiate his way to the correct answer even though it is subpar (although his accurate answers are impressive). That being said, I'm giving Google credit here. There is a small chance it might just be one of the first options I've described here.
- TYPE_FASTER 10y agoThis is also the test for the Technical Program Manager position. You must prepare rigorously to get through the initial conversation with a recruiter. The recruiter I spoke with seemed more open to me explaining why my answer was different than the recruiter OP dealt with.
- ddavidn 10y agoThat's pretty similar to what I was asked over the phone in an interview for API support (I forget exactly what the title was) for Google Maps, I believe. I got the SYN, SYN-ACK, ACK answer; questions about sorting algorithms; and stumbled a bit on random Linux questions, even though I use it daily as my desktop OS and have administered various Linux web servers for years without issue. I guess I use the man pages too much. The recruiter didn't cut my phone interview short, but did tell me that the technical interview was going to be WAY harder and that I needed to study my Linux, low-level networking, and algorithms. It was a good interview experience to have, but left me feeling like I'd never have the knowledge to pass a technical interview there.
- rcarmo 10y agoI had a very similar experience with them (around Java and Python dev questions) a few years back. Completely turned me off applying to Google, or replying to the numerous pings I get whenever they want to expand headcount in Europe. (I'm not going to mention other companies here, but I also had enough "technical" interviews of this kind to make me wonder if people actually know how to recruit outside their - often quite narrow - perception of what their area of expertise actually is.) Makes me quite sad, really, because there is zero assessment of experience, talent and know-how in this kind of interview (and whiteboard interviews can be ridiculous in their own right, too, but that's not the point here - it's just that they appear to be the next step in this broken appraisal).
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- tmptmp 10y ago>>Recruiter: I have to check that you know the right answers. This is classic: the right answers!! Must be google getting infested with managers who don't have shit clue about what is programming and computer science.
- pjlegato 10y agoThis well illustrates the problem with "CS Trivia" style interviewing. It's billed as "exploring your background and how you think, not quizzing you for specific answers," but almost always devolves into an adversarial ego-measuring contest to see who can recite the most trivia from memory. Much of of the content is minutiae that a working software engineer doesn't ever need to know and would just look up in the rare case where they did (how many bytes in a MAC address? Seriously?). It's particularly bad when, as here, the candidate knows more than the interviewer does. The interviewee gives exact, nuanced answers while the interviewer only knows approximately correct answers that don't quite match. The interviewer then feels that their ego is vulnerable, that they are facing a serious potential competitor for social status at the company. They then summarily reject the candidate's correct answers as a defense mechnaism.
- k__ 10y agoGood to see that recruiting is broken for big positions too.
- darioush 10y agoThis is exactly on par with my experience with them -- I was interviewing and a particular engineer just wouldn't let me move forward with "linked list" because he wanted me to say "queue".
- meshko 10y agoI've interviewed at google for a lower position, and recruiters don't do phone screens or ask technical questions.
- diyseguy 10y agoHe failed in the first sentence: > I started coding 37 years ago (I was 11 years old) they wrote him off right there
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- XCSme 10y agoWell, I had a similar experience in my last (out of 9) interviews for a SWE position, and that interviewer was simply not accepting answers other then his, even though they were sometimes better. Welp, I will start again my interviewing marathon at Google next week, hoping that this time I meet the right interviewers (which is the only way you can actually get in, not by knowing stuff).
- intrasight 10y agoThe process seems geared towards hiring people right out of school since they'd have no expectation that such a candidate would be able to answer such questions. Am I right in thinking that it's easier to become a Googler by starting a company that gets acquired than by submitting to such a broken interview process?
- qznc 10y agoI assume the easiest way to get into Google/Apple/Facebook is an internship.
- gcp 10y agoAm I right in thinking that it's easier to become a Googler by starting a company that gets acquired than by submitting to such a broken interview process? No, not at all. At least it used to be so that when Google acquired a company, they ran all your engineers through their interview process, and if more than half didn't make it, they stopped the acquisition and the deal was off. The justin.tv/Twitch people blogged about how this effectively made them a billion by stopping an early acquisition until they were worth much more. (Or at least that is what I remember reading - I can't find the article right now, so maybe it wasn't Twitch)
- asah 10y agoAnother google HR "experiment" that obviously failed...
- ljk 10y ago(un?)fortunately big companies like these have enough resources to have failed experiments..
- Scarblac 10y agoI was recently asked in an interview (for a position as programmer at a 3D printer startup): "When we have to update our software, we have to update thousands of machines. How would do you see that reflected in the _code_ of our _error recovery_?" Am I stupid, or is that a hard to answer question?
- Osiris 10y agoI've seen a lot of these types of blog posts on here, about interview practices at the large tech companies. Because of these posts, I have no interest at all in seeking an interview with Google, Facebook, or Apple. Maybe these types of interview practices are designed to reduce the applicant pool by scaring people away from even applying.
- asdfGUYasdfn 10y agoI laughed my ass off, at this. What a great comment on this website.
- ysavir 10y agoHmmm... * A link to his LinkedIn profile * A direct downlink to his resume (well, an HTML file for his LinkedIn page; same purpose) * Talking about how his skillsets are a "rare mix". * A "transcript" showing how he's smarter than the recruiter for a Google DoE position * Taking on a big company in a post bound to go Viral Yeah, this feels less like a blog post, and more like an attempt at a viral cover letter.
- noploop 10y agoThis guy has been at it for years. He isn't dumb but he doesn't seem to adapt to the world well.
- yalogin 10y agoWhy would a person interviewing for a director position let a recruiter do a tech screen? Wouldn't it at least be respectful for the hiring manager to do this evaluation? Something is very off here. Or does Google use the same "we have a generic interview and if you get through we will then decide which team to place you in" crap for director level hires as well?
- spicyj 10y agoGoogle almost certainly receives many thousands of applications for the position. It sounds like this particular "prescreen" may be badly designed, but after a prescreen you'd certainly expect to talk to more technically-literate and -competent people.
- animex 10y agoWow, I need to apply for a director job at Google. I knew about 8/10 things to the level that the recruiter knew about them with my 20+ year old C knowledge. The guy who responded was way better but obviously overqualified!
- poetwind 10y agoPerhaps the context of the interview is that you must answer using no more than three words or numbers. In this context defining a hashmap as a fingerprint or an inode as metadata is ok.
- btbuildem 10y agoLooks like the recruiter failed the interview here.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- 0xmohit 10y agoQ: What is 2+2? Me: 4 Recruiter: Wrong. 2 + 2 = 5 for very large values of 2.
- Klockan 10y ago> Google pagerank: the ultra-secret mathematical formula demonstrating that sponsored search results rank higher than reality can. I am not sure why he was rejected, but this sentence makes it clear that he isn't mature enough to be a directory so I doubt that Google misses him.
- outworlder 10y agoWell, assuming the transcript is even remotely correct, they should start doing phone screens using algorithms. I'd guess they would outperform this recruiter.
- dreamdu5t 10y agoIt seems easier to get Google to fund and then acquire your startup then get hired there.
- matchagaucho 10y agoThe irony of "Director" roles is that they're supposed to provide "Direction". This requires gently pushing Engineers out of their comfort zones and into new territory. Often a Director's specialized knowledge comes at the expense of defying conventional norms. Filtering for candidates that can answer CS trivia will just get you Directors that know trivia.
- omginternets 10y agoThis entire transcript reads like a metaphor for democracy.
- dekhn 10y agoI would like the original blog poster to state for a fact that the questions they posed are exactly the ones that were asked. In particular: the quicksort one. It doesn't jibe with my memory of how the question was asked (it was more like "what is the running time of quicksort").
- ankimal 10y agoAm I the only one who thinks that this is a terrible way to hire any Engineer, Director or not? I may have hung up after first 3 questions saying that "this does not sound like a good fit to me".
- greyman 10y agoI once coded chess playing algorithm for fun, and can confirm that the recruiter was correct on #9: you count bits by using a lookup table and then sum the results. It's the quickest way. But I am not sure if this is possible to figure out immediately without such experience...
- djmips 10y agocan you really confirm that? I'd like to see your code.
- gcp 10y agoAh, the appeal to authority. It depends, but generally speaking, you are wrong and OP is right that you'd want to benchmark on the actual architecture. a) First of all, you're probably basing your answer off of experience with 64-bit popcounts. But note the question was about popcounting multiple 16-bit words, not single 64-bit words. This isn't typically what you do in a chessprogram. b) The table has a cache footprint and can be pushed out of L1, which kills that approach in many real programs. c) Modern CPUs have a POPCOUNT instruction. It's slow and limited to one port on most Intel machines, though, so not necessarily always a win either. d) Lacking POPCOUNT, and with cache pressure, the SWAR approaches are good, especially if you can compute multiple results at once. With AVX2 it becomes especially interesting. f) If the the expectation is that many of the numbers are zero, a simple loop will win.
- bogomipz 10y ago>"Lacking POPCOUNT, and with cache pressure, the SWAR approaches are good, especially if you can compute multiple results at once" Can you explain what a SWAR approach is?
- Const-me 10y agoI recently tested different approaches. I’ve been working on some code that downsamples large set of 1 bit voxels to get shades of gray on the edges. For that, I had to counts gigabytes of those bits as fast as possible. Advanced manually-vectorized SIMD code worked several times faster that lookup, esp. on the hardware that supports SSSE3 or XOP instructions. And even when the hardware doesn’t have SSE4, doesn’t have SSSE3, doesn’t have XOP — SSE2-only backup plan is still faster than lookup tables. Here’s the code: http://stackoverflow.com/a/17355341/126995 http://stackoverflow.com/a/17355341/126995
- Animats 10y agoIs this for real? Does Google really hire interviewers that stupid? The list of questions is really dated. They're all pre-1990. The answers are dated, too. A Linux inode is the file system's representation of the base info of a file, from which the file's data blocks can be found. It also carries file metadata, but its real function is as the root of the file's block index tree. The format depends on the file system. The internal identity of a file is an inode number, not an inode. What you get from 'stat' is the file's metadata, which mostly comes from the inode data structure on disk, but isn't necessarily in the same format. The formats were the same back around UNIX V7, but there have been some changes in the last few decades as file systems improved. If you need to count bits in a word, the first question is whether your CPU has hardware to do that. NSA always liked population count instructions, which are useful in cryptanalysis, and that's why most supercomputers had them since the 1960s. Now they're finally in Intel x86 CPUs with SSE4.2 (added around 2006), which has a "popcount" instruction.[1] A MAC address for Ethernet is six bytes. There are other hardware layer systems, and Google probably uses some of them. Fiber Channel fabric uses only a 3-byte address, for example. Hash tables are not O(1) lookup. It's an exponential as the table fills up. It's near O(1) only with a near-empty table. There's a space/time tradeoff on how full you let the table get before you expand it. Quicksort is average O(N log N), but the worst case is much worse, which is why nobody uses pure Quicksort any more. You can beat O(N log N) with a distribution sort. The first sort to do that was SyncSort, the first patented algorithm. It's a distribution sort with self-adjusting buckets. Who wrote this interviewer's answer sheet? [1] http://wm.ite.pl/articles/sse-popcount.html http://wm.ite.pl/articles/sse-popcount.html
- smnscu 10y agoAs many people here have already commented, these are some screening questions asked in the first informal chat with a recruiter. I got the same questions this week, but they were presented as a warmup, which I now realise might have been disingenuous. Thank you for the detailed answers, though – as always, your comments are extremely interesting and informative.
- catmanjan 10y ago> Hash tables are not O(1) lookup In terms of algorithmic time complexity, it is O(1)
- blahshaw 10y agoLooks like the page is down. Is there an archived copy somewhere?
- andersonfreitas 10y agoArchived version: http://archive.is/2Fj58 http://archive.is/2Fj58
- robmaister 10y agoI had a somewhat similar experience when I was doing an on-site interview for an internship at a different large tech company. There were multiple interviews with short (15-minute) breaks in the middle. Most people asked a mix of technical and behavioral questions, but one of the interviewers did things a little differently. After we briefly introduced ourselves, he immediately asked me a technical question. I usually talk through the problem and ask for clarifications, he mostly gave me non-answers. I was asked the same question by another company a week or two earlier, so I started writing out code on the whiteboard. At a few points I asked whether or not I should handle an edge case, and every single time he said "yes". When I was done writing all of the code, it took up pretty much the entire board. He asked me - "Why do you have so much code on the board?" and I responded "because I'm handling a lot of edge cases". As I recall that was pretty much the end of the interview. I'm generally pretty good at interviewing, so I took whatever he threw at me and just thought he was a little off. It's not hard to imagine someone who isn't great at interviewing or has imposter syndrome doing worse in that interview just because of the way the interviewer acted.
- Illniyar 10y agoHow is Tcp/ip stack, MAC addresses and low level linux commands are "up to date codong skills". Not saying they are not important, but you could have asked the same questions 20 years ago.
- dominotw 10y agoanyone have a mirror ?
- halisaurus 10y agoWebcache from Google: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:rPrtrh15wsMJ:www.gwan.com/blog/20160405.html+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:rPrtrh1...
- dominotw 10y agothank you
- temuze 10y agoMirror: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:rPrtrh15wsMJ:www.gwan.com/blog/20160405.html+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:rPrtrh1...
- nogridbag 10y agoSite is down. Does anyone have a mirror? Edit: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:rPrtrh15wsMJ:www.gwan.com/blog/20160405.html+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:rPrtrh1...
- albemuth 10y agoThose hex codes should come in handy XD
- sbierwagen 10y agoHe seems to be pretty proud of GWAN, but it doesn't appear to have stood up well to HN traffic.
- weixiyen 10y agoCould 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.
- sreque 10y agoI think the candidate made a simple mistake: the interviewer is always right. Your job in an interview isn't to be right or to teach the interviewer. Your job is to make the interviewer like you foremost, and second make the interview think that you're qualified. And of course no one likes being corrected or told they are wrong. In my opinion, it is better to do well on an interview and decide after the fact that you're not interested, than to do a poor job on the interview because you couldn't help yourself correcting the other person. For instance during one interview I was being asked questions about a particular topic, and I started to guess that the interviewer didn't understand 100% the topic he was asking about. Rather than correcting him, I simply tailored my answers to what I thought he was looking for, not what was right. I passed the interview and got a job offer, whereas if I had corrected the interviewer the results may have differed.
- bostik 10y ago> the interviewer is always right That is an awful sentiment, and I find myself in violent disagreement with you. A good number of my enjoyable interviews have been with candidates who clearly knew more than I did, and could expand from an interesting detail to a short ex-tempore lecture on the topic. I cherish each of those. An interview where I, as an interviewer, learn something is a fine thing indeed.
- sreque 10y agoIf the interviewer is in a position where he/she seems willing to listen and learn, then by all means impress. However, correcting an interviewer is always a dangerous gamble, and it is downright foolish to keep arguing with him or her when he/she doesn't agree with you.
- clifanatic 10y ago> That is an awful sentiment, and I find myself in violent disagreement with you. You find yourself in violent insistence that the world is the way you wish it was, rather than the way it actually is.
- 10y ago
- joncooper 10y agoI'm surprised when people are surprised that Google's interview process is obnoxious. That's pretty well established by this point, both by Google employees and others.
- rockdoe 10y agoThere's literally quite a few people in here, including Googlers, that can't believe Google asks these questions. (I don't necessarily believe the interview went down as reported, but the questions and the interviewer using a sheet with approved answers definitely are genuine)
- yarou 10y agoJust a general comment, again anecdotal. There seems to be a trend of recruiters performing bait-and-switch in SV currently. For example, you may be hired for a technical role, but you end up doing manual work or bash script maintenance. Another tactic (this one is pretty hilarious) is that hiring managers will continuously interview new people for the same job description, without any intention of hiring them, in order to keep the slot open. Sad, but true.
- bsg75 10y agoIn summary: "Recruiter: that's not the answer I have on my sheet of paper."
- fspacef 10y agoCan anyone access parent site? Seems we have given it the HN kiss of death.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- stefap2 10y agoI had a Google phone interview around 2008. I remember a question how much is 2^5 (without calculator :).
- adambmedia 10y agoAnd what is an SRE at Google? https://www.atlassian.com/it-unplugged/devops/site-reliability-engineering-sre https://www.atlassian.com/it-unplugged/devops/site-reliabili...
- daenney 10y agoThese are pretty much the questions I got asked on the recruiter screening interview for SRE/SWE. But I kind of agree with the sentiment of "uhg, srsly, are we still doing this?". I answered a few of those with "not sure, I'd Google that". The recruiter's reply was "but what if Google's down". Well, there's always Bing.
- knorker 10y agoYou would think that someone posting prescreen questions in anger would at least bother to edit the transcript so that they gave the right answers. An inode is not an identifier. This super-awesome-knowitall has not bothered googling "define inode" before posting this. If this really is the transcript then not only did you answer questions wrong, you also argued with the recruiter. I have worked with people who used to be the best where they came from, who are not used to being wrong. This guy did not handle it well. If this really is a true transcript, with internal monologue, then Google has avoided accidentally hiring someone arrogant who can't accept being wrong, or is at least not open to being wrong. The reaction -- posting prescreen questions in anger in retaliation -- only reaffirms that Google did the right thing.
- burgerdev 10y agoDid anyone bother to read up on this 'business' of his? I just spent some time in the Wayback Machine[1], and it strikes me as pretty odd: unbreakable encryptions systems (which are not disclosed), NSA backdoors everywhere and general paranoia.
- probinso 10y agoThe problem is Google doesn't need you. Google gets onefinity applications per day. If they shave %90 percent of cold applicants this way then they will not hurt for more applicants. A company that large will gain it's best participants by reference. ----------------------------------------- my interview with google was very short. them: what is 2 ^ 37? me: can I use a calculator? them: no me: then we are done here.
- mikeash 10y agoDid they want an exact answer? Getting closeish without a calculator is not too hard: 2^30 is about a billion, so 2^37 is about 128 billion.
- YZF 10y agoYou don't need a calculator for that, it's: 10000000000000000 ... (binary obviously) I could say pretty quickly it's somewhere around 12 billion decimal but an exact answer on paper would take me some time... The amazing thing is that everyone thinks they're hiring the best people while it's pretty much never true. Generally speaking a place that pays well, treats people well and has challenging work will have better people than a place that doesn't and the hiring practices ability to filter beyond that are negligible. OOPS 128 billion :)
- AndyBMapMan 10y agoReceived a phone interview for the UK Google Maps team. Interviewer couldn't pronounce 'spatial'. My heart sank. spat-e-all. spat-e-all. \o/
- zxcvvcxz 10y agoThis is weird - do big companies actually ask stupid questions I can google, and let non-technical people lecture engineers on Big-O? Hope this obviously talented person finds more meaningful employment elsewhere.
- clifanatic 10y ago> do big companies actually ask stupid questions I can google Well, he was interviewing _for_ google. Maybe they wrote up the test before google was online and forgot to update it.
- rkwasny 10y agolooks like he needs a better web server for hosting his blog :-)
- ausjke 10y ago"Powered by G-WAN" but that is down. Based what the interview goes, Google might be on the "down" path too.
- _Marak_ 10y agoThe Google interview process is a disaster. Incompetent HR is apparently the norm. When I finally got to my ( 8th? ) interview there, I was asked by a very senior manager whether or not I had ever used Github before. Considering Google cold contacted me based on the specific email address and projects I make available on my Github profile, it was kinda was confusing. Ohh yeah, he also asked me what CSS stood for. I ended up stopping the interview early myself.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- mcbits 10y agoIf I ran Google, I would just send unsolicited offers for a three-month trial contract to people who fit the profile of a talented software engineer with a friendly personality and who recently started searching for jobs. Yes, I know, "that's why you don't run Google," but I don't think it's that crazy. For example, I may or may not be a good fit, but even if I am, the chances are slim that I'll ever have the confidence to apply.
- ayyn0n0n0 10y agoaaaand website is offline 100%
- ayyn0n0n0 10y agoI think he took his website offline. You can see read cached version here, http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:53TICuYCFiYJ:gwan.com/blog/20160405.html+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:53TICuY...
- Ygg2 10y agoIt's not, it just got overloaded. Guess G-WAN can't handle Hacker News. Funny that. In case you missed it: G-Wan is a software he is selling, which supposedly is twice or fourt times faster than everything, including nginx and varnish cache.
- mathattack 10y agoThis seems a bit strange. I know some senior Google folks who spend a ton of time interviewing. Could it be that these are maxed out, and that HR people are forced to do the initial screens? In that case it's best to just feed them the simplest accurate answers possible. Similar to taking the SATs. This type of process does imply something about their recruiting funnel. HR people asking technical questions suggests they've historically passed too many technically deficient people to overworked senior engineers.
- beamatronic 10y agoHave any current Googlers here had an experience where they knew someone personally, could vouch for their skills, but still could not get them in, due to them not passing the interview process?
- masto 10y agoI'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 read this and think Google asks really dumb questions, I think if you saw the "real" questions, you might come away with a different opinion (especially if you understand the nature of prescreening vs. an actual interview). A hypothetical example, let's say the complaint is about the following exchange: R: What's a potato? A: It's a vegetable that grows in the ground. R: Wrong. It's brown. A: Potatoes come in different colors, and they are vegetables that grow in the ground. R: Wrong. It says on my sheet that the correct answer is brown. when in reality the question was "What color are Russet potatoes?" I don't know what happened here. Something, unfortunately, went off the rails.
- smnscu 10y agoWell 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.
- masto 10y agoIf 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.
- smnscu 10y agoI stressed the fact that I had this interview 4 days ago – I'm 100% I got the same questions. My guess is it's because they are really just to give candidates an impression of what the actual interview is going to be like – this is what my recruiter said as well. Again, this is NOT the phone screen, just the first informal chat with the recruiter.
- 10y ago
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- ohstopitu 10y agoWhen I interviewed at Google for a Ads Solutions Engineer, I had some of these questions asked as well. (I got an 8/10 and was pushed to the next round). I assume they have a massive list of questions (for various positions and have a minimum cut off - 7/10 I'm assuming as a few of my friends who got 6/10 and were not moved forward) and are asked to all applicants without consideration of experience/skill/previous work as well explained by Max Howell[0]). [0] https://twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768?lang=en https://twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768?lang=en
- yandrypozo 10y agoThis is the best example of one unintentional DoS attack, now I cannot read it anymore :(
- nebulous1 10y agoWell, I think it's clear that the author is qualified to move beyond this stage of phone screening. So, the interviewer was at fault for not passing him, mainly due to a lack of technical knowledge imo and possibly and incomplete cheat sheet. That said, I question how he's phrased some of the question/answer pairs. For instance, this is a phone interview so the questioner can't capitalize KILL in the signals question ("what is the name of the KILL signal?"), which makes me wonder how the question was actually phrased. It does strike me that SIGTERM is what the 'kill' command will send by default, which could have been the intent of the question. He obviously still should have passed though, all of his answers indicated a good knowledge of the subject, and that's even if you consider them to be ultimately incorrect. I guess it's possible that op's tone didn't ingratiate him to the interviewer, but that's impossible to say with the information we have.
- joeblau 10y agoThey need to get rid of that recruiter. He/She is obviously not technically educated enough in computer science enough to understand the meaning of what is being said - Only the literal answer.
- Merovius 10y agoSo… someone care to explain to me where I'm going egregiously wrong, apparently? Because, at least on my machine with the code I spewed out quickly, the Kerningham way of counting bits is ~6x slower than a lookup table (including generating the table itself). http://sprunge.us/IIEH http://sprunge.us/IIEH The Kerningham way code seems faster for very sparse arrays (i.e. only one bit set per uint16), but slower otherwise.
- tjalfi 10y agoYou weren't doing anything wrong. He discusses two methods: https://graphics.stanford.edu/~seander/bithacks.html#CountBitsSetKernighan https://graphics.stanford.edu/~seander/bithacks.html#CountBi... https://graphics.stanford.edu/~seander/bithacks.html#CountBitsSetParallel https://graphics.stanford.edu/~seander/bithacks.html#CountBi... The second option will probably beat a byte lookup table. GCC switched from a lookup table to similar code. If this still isn't fast enough, try using SIMD registers and the Harley/Seal method based on carry save adders (http://www.hackersdelight.org/hdcodetxt/popArrayHS.c.txt http://www.hackersdelight.org/hdcodetxt/popArrayHS.c.txt). If you like this sort of bit twiddling, you probably would enjoy Henry Warren's Hacker's Delight.
- NetStrikeForce 10y agoOffered without comment: The site has been flaky, if not down, for hours now.
- whatvergoogle 10y agolol, site down. nice scale
- whatvergoogle 10y agolol, site down nice engineering work!
- rampage101 10y agoI think the person interviewing in this article should have seen the person doing the interview was looking for short answers. It is not a perfect interview process but I am not shocked he did not get it as you can see his annoyance as the interview goes on. He could have answered, "because Quicksort is N * lg(N)". Instead he opted to have a long answer about it depends how the algorithm is implemented. It either shows he is completely unfamiliar with big-O or he chose to give a annoyed answer. He could have also answered that there are a family of algorithms such as merge sort which are also N * lg(N). A bit skeptical of the transcript as well. Knowing a MAC address in bytes off the top of your head? Almost every other person would first think okay how many HEX characters is it, and how many bytes in a HEX. But he has this knowledge immediately?
- numan18 10y agoI found this amazing blog on various coding bootcamps available in the United States everything is mentioned in detail.Read now http://blog.livecoding.tv/americas-best-coding-bootcamps/ http://blog.livecoding.tv/americas-best-coding-bootcamps/
- numan18 10y agoI found this amazing blog on various coding bootcamps available in the United States everything is mentioned in detail.Read now http://blog.livecoding.tv/americas-best-coding-bootcamps/ http://blog.livecoding.tv/americas-best-coding-bootcamps/
- kafkaesq 10y agoRecruiter: wrong, it's SYN, SYN-ACK and ACK; if Google is down you will need to know this to diagnose what the problem is. We will stop here because it's obvious that you don't have the necessary skills to write or review network applications. You should learn the Linux function calls, how the TCP/IP stack works, and what big-O means to eventually qualify if you are interviewed at a later time. Good luck, bye. Whether he got interviewed for the wrong position by mistake or not -- how can Google begin to think that putting technically illiterate people in charge of "vetting" obviously highly senior people... could ever possibly be a good idea?
- zzzcpan 10y agoHiring on their scale is generally unsolvable - anything goes.
- mrmrcoleman 10y agoSite's down?
- fluxlemur 10y agohttp://archive.is/2Fj58 http://archive.is/2Fj58 ctrl-f for "down" next time :P
- jsmthrowaway 10y agoI am doing neither of those things. I said it was tempting, because it puts things I've read about G-WAN into perspective (the claims I saw some time back when I was shown a heads-up versus nginx were questionable, and it's an interesting data point). That's why it's an unrelated addendum, and it's completely unrelated to the blog post at all. I have no desire to discredit someone I have never met and whose name I do not know, much like I have no desire to have my intentions explained to me by a Hacker News commenter. I wrote, quite clearly, that I wasn't doing something. To directly assert that I am in fact doing that thing and then ascribe further malice to it is to challenge my honesty and integrity, and I'd appreciate if you'd not do that in the future because you've never met me and know nothing about me. There is an interpretation of my first bullet that would support your conclusion, but I only put down my first bullet to establish relevance in the comment, not to connect the two things.
- dilemma 10y agoI never said anything about your integrity but you inferred from my comment just like others will do from yours. The difference is the individual you're disparaging is a real person with a reputation. You, like me, are a throw away account on a message board. You have no integrity because you have no identity.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- icedchai 10y agoI had this almost exact same Google phone screen, in 2010, for an SRE position. I'm 100% certain this is not a director-level test. I thought it was incredibly simple. The second interview (phone interview with an engineer) was challenging. The third was on-site, and I failed, but was still a good experience. I'm a "small startup" type anyway.
- teh_user 10y agoThis 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.
- emmelaich 10y agoThe interviewee give the right answers but in a more precise and more low-level - even pedantic way. Clearly he know's much more about the questions than the interviewer but he's mistaken the nature of the interview. This really is a preliminary phone screen and he should have recognised the interviewers lack of experience early and just played the game. I'd be be tempted to not go ahead with him just for his lack of emotional intelligence.
- ajmurmann 10y agoWhat 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 last week.
- asciihacker 10y agoBeyond 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.
- pzh 10y agoThat'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 that they needed a stronger "signal" re system design, and to my surprise, scheduled me two more sys design interviews (I did a total of 7 on-sites). I prepared by reading all the Google, Facebook, and Amazon systems papers and did 6 mock interviews with Gainlo, where interviewers all gave pretty good feedback (which led me to believe I wasn't a total idiot). When I went to my final Google interviews, I thought I did pretty well except for a couple of TCP/IP questions related to checksums and congestion control. I found those odd because all the prep materials that recruiters sent me listed knowledge of TCP specifics as optional, and this isn't my area of expertise anyway. Oddly, one of the interviewers also seemed surprised that I wasn't a TCP/IP guru (--I bet that now he's telling his buddies stories about a candidate who couldn't do the SRE equivalent of Fizzbuzz or something similar.) A week later I get the rejection and a long survey containing a link to the job for which they applied on my behalf. It was an SRE position that required deep knowledge of TCP/IP and various other network protocols. My actual areas of expertise (for the last 10 years) are 3D graphics and computational geometry. Lesson learned: always check the description of the job that overly eager recruiters apply for on your behalf. Had I known, I would've studied all about TCP/IP and prepared for that level of detail. All that time I thought that I was applying for a general SWE track, and I simply expressed interest to be matched to teams specializing in infrastructure and distributed systems later.
- lgieron 10y ago> 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?
- pzh 10y agoNothing in particular. I was just looking for a bit of a change and to gain more rounded experience. Being pigeonholed into one specific area (3D/CAD/CAM C++ development) for many years isn't that great for future career prospects, especially in a market where most mainstream job titles seem to be split into a front-end or a back-end development category, and my experience doesn't seem to put me in either...
- BickNowstrom 10y agoThis entire blog post does not cast the author in a favourable light. First off: It is rude to post the questions and expected answers, perhaps moreso when you just failed to pass the test yourself. That reeks of sabotage out of spite. Then pulls the argument from authority, aggrandizing his accomplishments in an effort to salvage some of his obviously bruised ego. > Is Google raising the bar too high or is their recruiting staff seriously lacking the skills they are supposed to rate? Seems like Google raised the bar just high enough to weed out the unpleasant personalities. A job interview, even a phone screening, is not all about technical skill, it is also about soft skills: Is this person a pleasant and communicative person? > Recruiter: wrong, it's file metadata. > Me: the inode is an index uniquely identifying ... Here is where the interview (or at least, this is probably how the author remembered it) went off the rails. Arguing with the recruiter and trying to right a perceived wrong was just plain bad strategy. From there on out it starts being argumentative, and you can see the recruiter having none of it. > Recruiter: Quicksort has the best big-O. Here you can clearly tell the recruiter is just fishing for "correct" answers at this point. Just tell the recruiter with the big-O is here, don't be obtuse or difficult. > Why not let me compare my code to yours in a benchmark? Here it turns into a code-measuring contest. Not a very bright idea. By this point in the interview I find this author's personality very grating and needlessly argumentative. He can't do anything right by now. > We will stop here because it's obvious that you don't have the necessary skills to write or review network applications. The recruiter seems to agree with me, but I doubt this is what was said exactly. The conclusion may be similar though. > Maybe Google should have stated that practice is not necessary for the job. Maybe Google does know best what is necessary for the job. Or maybe the author knows, but he is too curt in getting his views across. Not a favourable trait. It is hard to not get salty over a failed job interview. It takes strength of character to not burn bridges and try again in the future with a more pleasant humble approach. Take it as a lesson and move on.
- iamleppert 10y agoI've been hit up by Google recruiters many times. I'll never interview there. The last time one of their recruiters hit me up he pretended it was for a Google X company, and then pulled a bait and switch on me, sending me a bunch of form e-mails on "interview prep" and how to expect their process would take 6 weeks minimum. No thanks. I'm not about to put myself through a 6 week interview process at 32 years old to go work for an ad company. I'm passed the point in my life where I care and need to justify myself by trying to get a big tech company job. Already done the big tech thing. It's not all its cracked up to be.
- jpgvm 10y agoThe standard Google phone interview. I got almost the exact same questions. My interviewer seemed more capable though. I also wasn't as technically correct as this gentleman so my slightly less correct answers were more "right". As sad turn of events given that I would have loved to answer the same way as he did here, these are much better answers than mine. But this is just technically recruiting, it's a crapshoot at best. It's much better to just take jobs at places that don't insist on trivia competitions.
- hclivess 10y agothis is horrible. just like any other C-rated company.
- joss82 10y agoI took this exact same test for a SRE (site reliabilty engineer) position at google earlier this year. I failed in the same way the author did but the recruiting person helped me so much that i could proceed to the next level. Obviously she was aware that this test was broken and that candidates would occasionally pass it by sheer luck. Other later interviews were equally broken in the same ways.
- inevitable2 10y agoMoishe Lettvin - What I Learned Doing 250 Interviews at Google https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8RxkpUvxK0 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 https://youtu.be/r8RxkpUvxK0?t=8m50s So yeah, the system is broken.
- junad 10y agoThere 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.
- Qantourisc 10y agoThe best solution to this problem is multiple choice.
- jackgavigan 10y ago> Recruiter: that's not the answer I have on my sheet of paper. That's not an interview. That's a waste of your time and an insult to your intelligence. This reminds me of the time Google rejected the creator of Homebrew because he couldn't invert a binary tree: https://twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768 https://twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768
- usernull 10y agoI interviewed with Google about 10 or so years ago for a manger post. I was not selected after 3rd phone interview. Potential job was about predicting number of servers required or something like that. I was recommended by a friend's friend who apparently worked there. Google contacted the day they saw my resume and did two quick phone interviews verifying my basic background. In the third interview which was highly technical, they asked a bunch of techie things including what an inode was. Whatever answer I gave about inode was apparently OK, as the interviewer proceeded to ask me how I would repair a faulty inode. Since I did not know the answer, I honestly said I do know and joked that I would "google" for the answer. My pathetic attempt at humor did not sit well with the interviewer and was told that I did not pass the current interview. Fixing inodes or other hardware/software problems is certainly something that needs to be done, but I did not buy the interviewer's assertion that everybody in Google knows how to fix inodes. For making predictions about server needs, failure rates are just one factor to consider and the time needed to repair them. Whether a prediction manager needs to know the low level details of fixing inodes is questionable in my mind. I just assumed that Google interviews a staggering amount of people and reject a large portion of them for the smallest of reasons (like how astronauts are selected). It also seems they hire people for one thing, but that does not preclude them in deploying them in totally different positions. Otherwise there was no reason to ask me techie questions. What surprised me was how fast they moved, how upfront they were about overall interview process, and how they asked about non essential questions from my perspective.
- badmin 10y agoHad similar questions for an SRE role, but yes i didnt like the fact that i had to answer these over the phone to a recruiter. Also i was asked what is 2^16
- asciihacker 10y ago>that's what happens when AI bots discover recreational drugs. LOL
- HeavyStorm 10y agoI do some interviewing for my company sometimes. HR people suck at it, but they don't ask any forms of technical questions. So it'd be strange to have such deep questions asked by a non technical person for such a high position. Secondly, I was interviewed by Google once. The interview was great (even though I failed it). Third, during this interview, I signed a kind of non disclosure. On the other hand: I was also interviewed by Microsoft. The interviewer was non technical, and asked at least two tech questions (the difference between a struct and a class in C++, and what volatile meant). And, finally, Roy Osherove has a similar tale about Google.
- jwatte 10y agoThinking more about this, it's also possible that the candidate failed on understanding what the screener wanted, and giving it to him. If the question was "what signal does kill command send by default" and the candidate hears "what is the name of the kill signal," that's an indicator about important communication skills.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- tofupup 10y agoneat
- botw 10y agofor this level, isn't the process itself a bit humiliating?