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Lots of grilling on obscure UNIX trivia and data structures/algorithms but nothing on the broader picture They understand that their process generates false ne

by sabat 16y ago

Lots of grilling on obscure UNIX trivia and data structures/algorithms but nothing on the broader picture They understand that their process generates false negatives but they don't want any "crud." But quizzing on random trivia is irrelevant to the process of eliminating crud. It's quite likely that a cruddy performer will be able to rattle off all known sorting algorithms or all the option flags for GNU grep -- that has absolutely no bearing on true intelligence or any of the other qualities that Google professes to be interested in. Having some insider's knowledge of Google: the process does not appear to be working. There is a lot of crud in there now, and the crud only seems intent on hiring more crud. Lots of power struggles and posturing; less and less innovative thinking.

X-Istence 16y ago
Ah, but this is not your normal unix trivia, the questions I were asked were stuff like what is an inode, where are inodes stored, what is a scheduler, what is the difference between /dev/mem and /dev/kmem and other questions along those lines. This is not just flags to give to a process to make it do something, this is system internals. When I mentioned that I knew FreeBSD fairly well I was asked questions specifically about UFS and the likes. I never did get asked about flags to grep and other UNIX tools.
- sabat 16y ago
  the questions I were asked were stuff like what is an inode, where are inodes stored, what is a scheduler, what is the difference between /dev/mem and /dev/kmem Precisely what I mean by unix trivia. What's the difference between /dev/mem and /dev/kmem? I think it's memory vs kernel reserved memory, but in my 16 years as a unix admin I have never once needed to know that. If I did, I'd go look it up. That is why I consider those questions trivial: they're not fundamental, although you can make them sound like they must be.

by sabat 16y ago

X-Istence 16y ago

Ah, but this is not your normal unix trivia, the questions I were asked were stuff like what is an inode, where are inodes stored, what is a scheduler, what is the difference between /dev/mem and /dev/kmem and other questions along those lines. This is not just flags to give to a process to make it do something, this is system internals. When I mentioned that I knew FreeBSD fairly well I was asked questions specifically about UFS and the likes. I never did get asked about flags to grep and other UNIX tools.

sabat 16y ago
the questions I were asked were stuff like what is an inode, where are inodes stored, what is a scheduler, what is the difference between /dev/mem and /dev/kmem Precisely what I mean by unix trivia. What's the difference between /dev/mem and /dev/kmem? I think it's memory vs kernel reserved memory, but in my 16 years as a unix admin I have never once needed to know that. If I did, I'd go look it up. That is why I consider those questions trivial: they're not fundamental, although you can make them sound like they must be.