Google's “Director of Engineering” Hiring Test
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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".
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.
I've done this kind of phone screen for an entry level position at Google, and while the recruiter wasn't an engineer, they did have some basic knowledge of the concepts involved, and were able to prompt me with follow-up questions if I missed something or got a question half right. The questions themselves are not strange, it's the alleged attitude of the recruiter.
Sure. For starters:
1. This guy apparently did not know he was interviewing for an SRE position.
2. The recruiter was looking for very very specific answers and immediately rejected any others.
3. There was no other discussion of anything, at all.
Source: I work for Google. Our daily schedule is packed with meetings and we try to be as on time as possible, interviews (which are something that everybody should be doing) work exactly the same, we don't try to screw people over with bad timing just to "test" them. Sometimes it happens that people miss interviews and somebody else has to show up, this is unfortunately a problem and it shouldn't happen but sometimes it does (accidents and unforeseen things happen). It's not done on purpose.
> Our daily schedule is packed with meetings and we try to be as on time as possible
If Google's goal were to respect the candidate's time, interviewers wouldn't have daily schedules packed with meetings. The less slack in a system, the worse the failures are. That employees try to be "as on time as possible" is a sign that everybody understands the scheduling is unrealistic.
This isn't unusual, by the way. Most hiring processes don't optimize for candidate experience. Or even for good hiring decisions. Indeed, if you take a POSIWID view of typical hiring processes, the point is to make interviewers feel powerful and selecting for people people willing to put up with inefficiency and suspicious power dynamics.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12701650
...creates an alternative interpretation in my mind that's not as bad. That is that the questions were a filter attempt done wrong in that it didn't account for stronger candidates giving better answers with a way for interviewer to confirm them. On top of that, a simple, data, entry error by HR person or whoever forwarded his name to them might have put him in wrong interview category. That's two, small problems vs a huge one implied here.
Although the damage appears huge if they're filtering out candidates with his track record with the pre-screens.
I hope you'll agree that there is no way a correct answer would ever validate this question.
If "Why Quicksort is the best sorting method?" really was the question, then the recruiter must have asked it from memory and misconstrued it. It's certainly not a standard Google SRE interview question.
Yes, I'm not expecting the conversation to have been exactly that, but it shows problems regardless.
As for customer support, it depends on the product you are talking about. Your free gmail account or $5 purchases through the play store: don't expect a lot of support here (but there is some). If you are using Google Cloud, Apps, AdWords, or other products where you pay, you can expected to get amazing support (this will change with your spend level). For example: on the cloud side, you can pay for support contracts that gets you lots of 1-on-1 time with Google support staff to help you use the services[0]. Or with the new Pixel, there is on-phone support[1].
To be fair, I've interviewed people at previous companies that had patents and 15 years at IBM on their CV and completely failed even the most basic system / coding questions. (fizzbuzz style).
There are a lot of people that read great on the CV but then it turns out that they mostly kept a chair warm and organized meetings over the last decade without actually retaining any technical knowledge.
Not saying that was the case here, but it happens and it's probably worth checking people on their stated qualifications.
Because there are people applying for software engineering jobs that still can't answer those questions.
This type of coding exercise can potentially answer more questions about the candidate in two minutes than 30 minutes of softball questions about the candidate's past experiences.
I think that people who disagree simply haven't done much interviewing or haven't worked on a team with someone who couldn't do much more than copy/paste code from SO.
Absolutely. Last time I went through trying to hire people was about a year ago. Easily 90% of the applicants we saw were completely unqualified. You have to have a way to weed them out.
You want a simple question that isn't common, but that shows how they break down a problem under stress. Example: you have an input with paragraphs at 80 characters. Write a function to return the same paragraphs wrapped to 40 characters. You cannot break a word and must maintain paragraphs.
Great design questions: a word problem (You have an autoshop with, staff and customers. Customers can own multiple cars. A staff member gets assigned to a car with a work order...) .. draw an ER diagram. This is actually a pretty low stress question. It should be straight forward. If someone draws a terrible ER diagram with lists in tables and no normalization, or unnecessary relationships (or you have to keep asking them to label 1-to-n/n-to-1 relationships and they struggle), you know they're not going to be good at designing database schemas.
Another great general knowledge question: "A user types in a web address into a web browser and hits enter. Describe what happens. Go into as much detail as you can." This gives people a change to elaborate as much as they can. People can talk about DNS, HTTP, load balances, HTTP request/response, cookies, load balancers, web apps vs static content...
Questions need to be geared to the job. You don't ask someone to draw an ER diagram if they're being hired to rack servers and setup VMWare. Likewise you don't ask a web developer to write a function to do matrix multiplication.
You're saying this is a bad question because it's too complicated? Am I missing something? It really doesn't seem more complicated than the paragraph question to me, but maybe I'm having a brain lapse.
The results speak for themself. All the good applicants do it in no time, without hesitation and give a perfect answer and usually some style points on top. The ones who have second grade coding skills have always something wrong with it.
It's a good 5 minute test whether someone can code or not. It shouldn't be the only test, of course.
We do watch them work though so if they just copy and paste from stack overflow and they don't understand the problem, it's pretty obvious.
If you require using real, compiler correct language in a coding exercise, and the problem is not trivial, than allowing search is more than fair.
But the point of Fizzbuzz is being such trivial problem that it really should not require nothing more than an understanding of basic programming logic and constructs.
In my (limited) experience, there were instances where the candidate could not even decide on a programming language to use, I told them to use pseudo-code and they still flunked horribly.
Aside from that, Fizbuzz is rarely a dealbreaking task in itself, it tends to correlate pretty well with the overall performance, I would be surprised seeing someone failing fizzbuzz and excelling in the rest of the interview (once again, in my limited experience).
But really, if an applicant needs to google to solve FizzBuzz, they don't have a firm grasp of the fundamentals. You're required to write one loop, a few if/then/elses and understand how the modulo operator works. Our jobs are much more demanding than that.
It's a (sadly) useful screen. Even more sad when you realize how popular and widespread that particular question is.
I'd expect any technical candidate to be able to do at least a fizzbuzz-type question.
if you hiring a house builder u would not ask him what a brick looks like right?
The problem with this is that a home builder/contractor will have a long list of references, and possibly examples of her work available for examination. Many engineers search for jobs while still employed, so they generally don't include as references co-workers and current managers. Further, if your employer doesn't allow you to open source your work, then you need to do open side projects to have any sort of real resume prospective employers can examine (and this is problematic since your day job may already take more than 40 hours of your time).
So, no, I don't need to ask a contractor if he knows what a brick looks like, but I do need to look at his references, look him on Angie's List, post to local message boards about his work. And, of course, I'm not an expert on home building, so it would be unreasonable to ask him questions about carpentry or framing.
I had a candidate in a few months ago that was interviewing for Software Development Manager, so he got an initial phone screen and then a face-to-face with myself and another dev on the team he'd be managing. I was impressed with how little he knew about programming.
"Name some data structures." "What does MVC stand for?" "Name some design patterns" etc. All of which were unanswerable. Generally when it becomes clear someone was dishonest about their skillset, the ability to get hired for any position becomes impossible.
Hell, someone could be able to define MVC and explain how you would use it, but have no idea how to actually implement something using it for a given programming language.
"Could you write out what an HTTP request and response looks like on the board?"
I'm really surprised at how many people can't do this. If you've spent five years developing web, surely you've had to look at raw requests, either debugging using netcat or with wireshark or just looking at the information in the Chrome/Firefox debugger?
"What's the difference between a GET and a POST request?"
"What is the difference between a statically typed and a dynamically typed language?"
I had one candidate try to tell me Java was dynamically typed and Scala was statically typed. It was for a Scala position. They also said "statistically typed" instead of statically, even after I corrected them.
-_-
And 95% haven't used netcat or wireshark. I wouldn't have either, if it wasn't for some particular work related to messaging.
They're able to develop reasonable line of business websites in spite of that.
I would be extremely worried if they were unable to answer about the difference between GET or POST, or the difference between statically and dynamically typed languages, so I agree with those.
Yeah expecting many people to be able write out a complete http request from memory without a reference to look at. But the general structure of a http request is something so basic to web development that asking what the structure of a http request looks like isn't an unreasonable expectation.
Request line (method, uri), header(s), empty, body...
CGI is also cool to learn about the workings of, since it almost seems too simple.
Sure I did.
Then I forgot most of the details because they didn't matter, and I knew I could look them up quickly if I ever needed to write a HTTP client/server for some reason.
Because you did: after that you have to provide a Host: <hostname>.
You need two newlines to finis the request, plus the HTTP 1.1 standard requires clients to send a Host: header for all requests.
Not saying every interviewer would care about that in an early screening process.
Learning to use wireshark or tcpdump is a power tool that does show whether you got more experience in understanding the lower levels, or stayed at requirements-and-tests. (Not necessarily bad, but a good "fork" to jump off from)
As always, this sort of question is a test of competence by proxy and there are usually outliers, but statistically speaking, I think you'll find a very high correlation between inept programmers and people who don't know the difference.
I have a follow up question, "What are the advantages of a dynamically typed language over a statically typed one?"
This one kinda exposes the "Java-zellot" side of programming. If you love Scala and you're applying for Scala position, you don't often think like this. Being able to think critically about the things that are harder in Scala, that would be easier in a language without strict type checking, is a another good way to gauge if people can think critically.
I actually just sat down in a meeting with a dozen programmers, some of them with decades of experience, and half of them didn't know what functional programming was.
Your example shows that not every programmer has to know that.
A previous employer had a sysadmin wiki. We call it Devops now, but I really liked working with the plain-text files of Dokuwiki there. Confluence is good for some things, but as a notebook of shell snippets and when to use them, it's not great.
Asking "wtf did you just do" is responsible for probably 1/5 to 1/4 of the professional knowledge I have today. It's sad that many people ignore that people will often teach you their little tricks if you ask.
I once aced a geography exam because I happened to read up on the economics of Nigeria just before I took it. By sheer luck, there was a question about Nigeria in the paper.
If I'd read about Zimbabwe instead I'd have been screwed.
Neither possibility provided much insight into my competence as a geographer.
Even if a job spec needs specific knowledge of key facts, you can't generalise from pass/fail memory questions to broad spectrum competence, or lack of it.
If a candidate has no idea what an HTML request is, that's one thing. If they know damn well what a request is but can't list all the elements in a stressful interview while you're staring at them, - because in fact they spent the last year working on database code, and the API stuff was the year before that - that's something else entirely.
Why should anyone remember what an http request or response should look like? Statically typed vs. dynamically typed language?
Fuck.
Are these entry-level positions or for someone with 10 years work-ex? A simple search on Google can tell anyone the answer of these questions, why do you expect people to carry an imprint of it in their memory? If the problem they'll work on mandates knowing these things it'd be pretty easy to solve with just one search. It is exactly questions like these that are worth kicking the host organization back in the butt.
Either your interviewing process is hilariously stupid or you're just spiking it up to boost the ego here.
Compare static with N tests, vs not static with N tests. In what case would the not static be safer?
The claim that "dynamically type language" allows code to more closely follows the business logic has merits. And you could follow from that to claim that type system could be causing more bugs (ie less safe).
The only code you can be sure isn't buggy is code that doesn't exist.
* The object returned no longer has member/property x, it is obtained by other means;
* The endpoint returns list of such objects.
Fun thing: in the second case if your code manages to convert input list to a map and assign one returned object to a key that coincides with the removed property and map access looks syntactically the same as property access (a very specific set of assumptions, though), the bug can butterfly quite deep into the code before manifesting :)
And then your non-engineer phone screener who's expecting the answer to match the scripted sheet will conclude that I don't know this "fundamental" thing and thus am unqualified.
It's a hypothetical no-go! Every person, even the fourth grader knows the number 4. So why ask a question that measures their ability to remember 4, say 4 or show that they know 4.
> I don't see how a programmer could be remotely competent without having been exposed…
Share this link with them:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1517582/what-is-the-diffe...
Invest in people and people will invest back in your business. Interview process that I follow at my workplace has just one goal to assess: whether or not it'd be great to work with this person and spend over ~50 hours per week with them.
Absolutely! This is super super important. Fun to work with, not annoying to waste time with.
> know nothing about computers
It's sad that you think this way of people who couldn't answer your questions at the expected level.
> Or are there actually more criteria than you let on here?
Yes! One way to know if they're any good or not suitable is by giving them a problem statement like so:
'Design X, feel free to choose a language that's suitable for this problem', and then may be proceed to hint with: 'You might want to look at advantages of Static versus dynamic typing'… and then let them ask whatever questions they want to ask or read up or search or start implementing whatever.
Observe what they do -- and how fast can they get to the decision of what language and why. And how to make X (break down of steps) or if they can dive and start making X there itself. Note, if they had theoretical knowledge of what you seek during an interview it will work to their advantage naturally. Or sometimes not.
Of course, this process may not work for you as it does for us -- therefore seeking direct answers about static vs dynamic language may not be such a bad question after all (I get it), but expecting people to accurately remember what an http request or its response looks like may not be fruitful at all. It can throw good people off guard and ruin the rest of the interview for them.
There are a number of basic items that a competent programmer needs to know off the top of his head. If they had to google for every single item, then their productivity goes down the drain and so does the entire team's productivity. You should fix your hiring.
"OK, so you'd like to work here as a mechanic. What's the difference between automatic and manual transmission?"
"It's not fair to expect me to know that off the top of my head. If I need to know, I'll just do a Google search."
You're gonna have a hard time drawing a comparison between a line of work where you build things and one where you fix things.
Nope, more like "can you write out on the board what types of connectors are used in the car cooling system and in what order".
But could they at least tell you why quick sort was the best sorting algorithm?
Of course, a sample of one (anecdota) which is most likely the min of the distribution is always the worst way to judge a distribution, but this is still upsetting.
It's possible that he got frustrated, became condescending towards the recruiter, and the recruiter decided to screen him out.
There are plenty of companies who turn down candidates that are false negatives for various reasons. Author should probably not take that personally and just apply again.
I also agree with the grandparent, I'd be very sceptical about this transcript being 100% accurate.
I passed several rounds of interviews at Google over a number of years (phone screening, phone interview, on-site). This is definitely a phone screening, where the recruiter expects "standard" answers to "standard" questions. Remember that interviews are somewhat of a game. Trying to be smart at this stage is the wrong move.
I went through a Google phone screen once. (For full disclosure, I've interviewed on-site twice and failed that both times.)
One problem posed on the phone screen involved finding the last 1 in an infinite array consisting of a finite number of 1s followed by an infinite number of 0s. I described the search strategy "check index 0/1/2, then progressively square the index until a 0 is found, then use binary search to find the first 0". The screener objected to that strategy on the grounds that successive squaring "grew too fast" and successively doubling the index would be faster overall.
Once the call concluded, I looked into it and determined that those two strategies are almost exactly equivalent. This didn't leave me impressed with the phone screen process.
Then again, I apparently passed the screen despite making that "mistake". Still, I think the least courtesy you can extend to interviewees is to not correct them when they're right and you're wrong. :/
Seems you don't know much what Google's SRE job is about.
I like to try to gather facts before assuming things. IE Ready, aim, fire, not fire, ready, aim.
Admittedly more difficult in this case (and certainly, i have no access to it)
Second i'm going to point out a few things:
Experience may translate into wisdom, it may not. Plenty of companies promote people just because they last long enough. So 20 years experience managing may translate into a high level manager, it may not!
I hold a bunch of patents too on compilers and other things, it's not indicative of much in terms of skill, because almost anything is patentable.
Lastly, SRE is not an ordinary site maintenance position by any means. I"m not even sure where to begin to correct that. I guess i'd start here: https://landing.google.com/sre/interview/ben-treynor.html
Does this mean this person is under/overqualified/exactly right? I literally have no idea. I just don't think it's as obvious one way or the other.
"Well, that sounds like a dumb recruitment process."
Judging an entire recruitment process based on one side of a story from a person who's clearly upset about an interview, and even 3 sentences i wrote on hacker news, seems ... silly.
If you want to do it, okay.
But everyone in this entire thread seems to be making snap judgements without a lot of critical thinking. That makes me believe a lot of people here have a ton of pre-existing biases they are projecting onto this in one direction or the other (and you are, of course, welcome to claim i fall into this category too!)
I almost didn't jump into this discussion because it seems so polarized and rash compared to a lot of others
I think i'm just going to leave it alone because it's not clear to me the discussion is going to get any more reasonable.
Now, instead, they generally don't recruit (google is too large to not have exceptions) without some specific hiring managers and headcount in mind.
They will tell you what those groups are and what they do. So for example, the person i interviewed last week was targeted at two teams. I actually specifically asked if he knew what he was being interviewed for, because i like to get some idea what the candidate thinks whatever job they are interviewing for means, and he was able to tell me the two groups and knew what they did.
I did know I was interviewing for a general SWE role, but not anything more than that, and from all appearances the team was completely up in the air until after my interviews.
I don't know how much has changed since 2014. I also didn't get any of these pre-screen testing questions from a non-engineer. Is that normal practice for all interviews now?
It's not just this guy. There have been others: https://twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768
There's another measure I use to measure the quality of their hiring process. The output. Namely the track record of products Google has developed in house in the last 10 years.
I've also heard a few stories about friends applying for a position and being shunted by the hiring process into the hiring funnel for other (plainly unsuitable) positions. When I hear a very specific criticism from two separate places it's hard to stay skeptical.
That's a poor metric to evaluate the rampant complaints about a high false negative rate. I don't think that many people are disputing that the people who do get hired are qualified most of the time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lars_Rasmussen_(software_devel...
Was it software quality that killed Wave and Glass, or was it more of the market not wanting either of those things? (To digress, it seems like both of those products came too early. Do you think that wearable computers will _never_ exist? And Slack seems to be the Wave-like thing that the market wanted.)
From what I've heard from insiders, the adwords code base is an enormous mess. Not surprising for a product that old perhaps, but this points to their engineering practises being about as mediocre as the industry average.
I don't honestly know why people want slack. It seems to just be in vogue - one of those weird network effect things. It doesn't seem to have anything to do with their feature-set or engineering quality because it's not noticeably better than, say, hipchat.
>To digress, it seems like both of those products came too early. Do you think that wearable computers will _never_ exist?
They already exist.
I think Google is pretty good at hiring "qualified" engineers who are very good at maintaining and scaling existing systems, but the process definitely selects against entrepreneurial product-focused engineers. Maybe Google thinks that's fine though: they can always pick them up through an acquisition later, albeit at 100x the price.
It's a common failing these days, but you should probably look into getting it fixed.
That said, yes, Google's hiring process is questionable. The Web is full of horror stories from obviously-qualified people who Google passed on, often very early in the process when no engineer had talked to them, and this suggests Google's success is not sustainable so long as that continues. They'll be able to hire fresh CS grads out of Stanford forever with this process, but the experienced/unconventional people they flunk out on the early screens are not going to come to them, and when their current crop of experienced/unconventional engineers retire or take jobs elsewhere, Google's finally going to have to fix this problem and stop pretending that it's better to pass on a thousand highly-qualified candidates than to give one unqualified candidate an on-site. That, or tumble back down into mediocrity.
(which, to be fair, is already mostly the case; Google is largely a mediocre company, with only a couple of externally-visible brights spots of talent or innovation clustered in a couple of particular teams, and otherwise Google runs on inertia and the hope that the 0.1% of interesting stuff they come up with will keep the 99.9% of mediocrity afloat)
Well, in 2006 Google was a 10 billion dollar search and ad company with a fledgeling email business without a revenue model, who had just bought youtube. In 2008 they shipped a mobile phone operating system. That's now a thirty billion dollar business which has been built up through talent within google. They undermined Microsoft's office monopoly with an online office suite (okay, some acquisitions underpinning that). They have a credible seat at the top table in the cloud market. And they continued to develop their core ad platform to drive more revenue growth.
I've got no particular reason to stand up for Google, they're quite big enough to look after themselves, but the idea that their product flops in the last decade outweigh those product successes, and can be held up as evidence that there is something deeply rotten in their hiring model, seems to be cherrypicking to me. 70% mobile OS share, 70% search share, and 50% of global online ad revenue... that's a pretty good kind of mediocrity.
It's also the case that Google is acquiring a reputation for bad interview/hiring processes, and for hiring people who have a Ph.D. in CS and putting them to work on CRUD web apps that any random coding-bootcamp grad could build, since there's just not enough interesting in-house work to keep all those top talents occupied.
Google (vs Alphabet) often acquires companies that have a seed of a useful product. Android for example was apparently not in a usable state when it was acquired. 99% of the creative work is making the thing actually work, not in having the prototype.
To say Google's own engineers didn't create Android because they didn't commit the very first line of code is doing them a disservice.
I don't necessarily blame them for plus (facebook was clearly a marketing success, not a technology success), but maps' decline isn't anybody else's fault. It has declined in quality and that is plainly an engineering failure not a product failure.
>Well, in 2006 Google was a 10 billion dollar search and ad company with a fledgeling email business without a revenue model, who had just bought youtube. In 2008 they shipped a mobile phone operating system. That's now a thirty billion dollar business which has been built up through talent within google. They undermined Microsoft's office monopoly with an online office suite (okay, some acquisitions underpinning that).
Well, yes. Acquisitions underpinned all of that success.
>I've got no particular reason to stand up for Google, they're quite big enough to look after themselves, but the idea that their product flops in the last decade outweigh those product successes, and can be held up as evidence that there is something deeply rotten in their hiring model, seems to be cherrypicking to me. 70% mobile OS share, 70% search share, and 50% of global online ad revenue... that's a pretty good kind of mediocrity.
All predicated upon outside purchases or the original self-reinforcing search monopoly developed before 2004.
What's worse is that they've often used their search monopoly to try to break into other markets (flights, shopping, etc. - plenty of stuff like this got preferential SERPs treatment) and failed because what they released was crap. That is, they failed even with a huge home ground advantage - the kind of monopoly advantage that let Microsoft make IE6 (IE6!) the industry standard for years and got them slapped by the DoJ couldn't even be put to good use by Google.
I'm not denying that they have some good engineers but the idea that they're the creme de la creme of the industry with the best hiring process is way way off base.
Right?
Then why ask about the nitty gritty details required by maintenance personnel as part of the screening process - things I would rather have my high level employees looking up rather than relying on a possibly faulty memory.
> Judging an entire recruitment process based on one side of a story from a person who's clearly upset about an interview, and 3 sentences i wrote on hacker news, seems ... silly.
This kind of opinion is not formed in a vacuum. It's formed of the dozens of posts that appear every year about how someone who seems qualified is turned down for spurious reasons like "being unable to reverse a binary tree on a whiteboard". It's what makes this particular post so believable - it fits the stereotype. Even your own developers who post here say "yeah, that's more accurate than inaccurate." Perhaps it wouldn't hurt to "undercover boss" your way through the interview process...
Speaking for myself, and only myself... I turn down all Google recruiters because I know I would not pass Google's interview process. Not because I don't have the skills, but because I don't have a college degree. Because I don't see the return on investment for studying for the next 6 weeks just to pass the interview process, especially when I won't even know if I'm getting a job I'll enjoy.
> I think i'm just going to leave it alone because it's not clear to me the discussion is going to get any more reasonable.
How about the responses from your own employees which are pointing out that they see the problem too. Are they being unreasonable?
This is one reason why i find it super-strange. It's not a set of "high level employee" questions. It's a standard SRE pre-screening.
"How about the responses from your own employees which are pointing out that they see the problem too. Are they being unreasonable?"
My view of unreasonable is not about whether there is a problem or not. It's not about the consensus. I don't actually have an opinion myself on the hiring process. If people i work on recruiting raise problems, i try to solve them. I have not had trouble trying to recruit in general. So i haven't formed a strong opinion, even after 11 years. If folks want to decide the process is horrible, okay. If folks want to decide it's great, that's also okay.
But it's unreasonable because it's both super-quick reaction without time to settle and think, and not aimed at anything other than trying to reinforce one view or the other.
Nobody is actually listening to each other, they are just trying to force whatever their view is, good or bad, on others.
So to answer you directly, i don't think pointing out a problem is unreasonable, but that's not my complaint. My complaint is that the actual discussion is not a discussion, but mostly people just arguing on the internet. IE You shouldn't take me saying "unreasonable" as a proxy for "me saying i think their viewpoint is wrong". I just think the mechanism of discussion here is unlikely to yield fruitful results.
To clarify, I was speaking of your standard SRE hires, whose position you referred to as "not maintenance drones".
> Then why ask about the nitty gritty details required by maintenance personnel as part of the screening process - things I would rather have my high level employees looking up rather than relying on a possibly faulty memory.
AIUI you can get easily 5 or more of the pre-screen questions wrong and still proceed to the next stage, depending on your experience and how wrong you are. The point here is not that you know each and every one of those things, but to show that you are, in general, knowledgeable enough to spend Engineer hours on.
And your judgement of these questions is seriously impaired by the fact that they are written down wrong. I assume, that the author of this post has written down a rough transcript from memory and as such it's colored by their own (mis)understanding of the question and whatever got leaked from memory in the meantime. The questions he wrote down are, at the very least, not verbatim the ones from the checklist given to recruiters (and there is a strong emphasis on reading them out verbatim there, so I consider it relatively unlikely that the recruiter didn't do that).
> It's formed of the dozens of posts that appear every year about how someone who seems qualified is turned down for spurious reasons like "being unable to reverse a binary tree on a whiteboard". It's what makes this particular post so believable - it fits the stereotype.
Exactly. You are reading "dozens of posts every year" from disgruntled interviewees who got rejected and are pissed. On the flip side, a quick internet search will tell you that Google gets on the order of millions of applications each year, meaning you don't hear from >99.99% of applicants.
There is also the widely advertised fact, that the Google hiring process accepts a high false-negative rate, if that also means a very low false-positive rate, so it is to be expected that a good percentage of qualified applicants still get rejected. It is thus also to be expected, that you hear from some of them. Meanwhile, again, you are not hearing from the thousands of qualified applicants that do get accepted each year. Because an "I interviewed at Google. It was pleasant, everyone was really nice and they got me a good offer" blog post won't draw a crowd on hacker news, even if it was written.
> How about the responses from your own employees which are pointing out that they see the problem too. Are they being unreasonable?
Let's not ignore the responses from Employees that don't think there is a problem.
From reading this post, I'd say a likely reason for the rejection is, that this person wasn't being particularly pleasant. Frankly, he comes of as kind of an arrogant prick. And, as a general rule, engineers at Google, just like everyone else, don't particularly like having unpleasant people on their team. And I also believe this post has gotten enough upvotes, that someone will look into the situation to see what went actually wrong here.
Please, feel free to correct the record, then, with the correct screening questions. The proverbial cat is out of the bag, and has gone tearing down the street towards everyone trying to make a buck by "training" hopeful young graduates on how to make it through the Google interview process.
> Because an "I interviewed at Google. It was pleasant, everyone was really nice and they got me a good offer" blog post won't draw a crowd on hacker news
No, it won't. Because it's the tech equivalent of a lottery winner saying they think the lottery system is a fair and equitable way to distribute money.
> Let's not ignore the responses from Employees that don't think there is a problem
Same problem. If you're in, you passed the Google employment lottery, so it's much more interesting (and should be more meaningful to management) when insiders agree that the hiring process has problems.
Now then, of course, so long as directors find that they have plenty of applicants to back fill attrition and grow, they have no reason to think the hiring process is broken; so long as Google is happy hiring not necessarily the best people for the job, but the ones lucky enough to dodge more false negative flags than everyone else. Better to be lucky than good.
All that said, yeah, Google's hiring process works for Google. Coming here, to a conversation started by a crappy screening experience, and expecting respect for a process with so many false negatives is a bit optimistic, though.
No can do. I actually like my job. And I also like my coworkers and don't want to make their life any harder.
> No, it won't. Because it's the tech equivalent of a lottery winner saying they think the lottery system is a fair and equitable way to distribute money.
The same goes for a "I interviewed at Google. It was pleasant, everyone was really nice but sadly I didn't got accepted" post.
The fact remains, that you don't read from >99.99% of people. My interview process was very pleasant. I had a bunch of nice conversations about programming and computers with friendly and humorous people.
> Same problem. If you're in, you passed the Google employment lottery, so it's much more interesting (and should be more meaningful to management) when insiders agree that the hiring process has problems.
There are a lot of insiders. With a lot of opinions.
> so long as Google is happy hiring not necessarily the best people for the job, but the ones lucky enough to dodge more false negative flags than everyone else.
Well, the thinking here isn't really "we want strictly the best". That would be a hopeless idea from the get-go. The thinking is "there is a hiring bar that we want people to pass and we want to hire exclusively from above that. We don't care about the sampling of that, as long as we get that". What they end up with is a pretty broad sample of that population. Some (like me probably, tbh) just barely pass the bar, some are the very top. Some other top-people got unfortunately rejected, some other barely passing people too.
So yes. There is indeed no ambition to actually get just the top 100K engineers in the world.
> All that said, yeah, Google's hiring process works for Google. Coming here, to a conversation started by a crappy screening experience, and expecting respect for a process with so many false negatives is a bit optimistic, though.
Well, mostly I (and DannyBee) are just pointing out obvious flaws in the discussion here. Like the obvious self-selection bias and selective reporting. And the also obvious fact that this particular post was written while angry and only represents one side of the story; and that not even accurately.
Secondarily, in these long-wound comment threads on reddit/hackernews/twitter, people seem to usually not even be aware of the goals of the hiring process and think "look, here, three prominent false negatives" is an actual argument about the process being flawed.
I'm not sure what "nitty gritty details" you're talking about here.
As much as some people here think it's impressive knowledge[1] to be able to give the size of an ethernet MAC address without Googling it, that's something that anyone with experience in computer networking oughts to know. Not at all because it's useful knowledge, but simply because if you actually spend time looking at network traffic dumps or ARP tables or DHCP configuration or SLAAC assignments you'll be seeing MAC addresses so often that it just becomes obvious. Just like knowing that an IPv4 is 4 bytes and an IPv6 16 bytes. Or that a TCP connection starts with a 3-way SYN/SYN-ACK/ACK handshake.
And the same thing applies to the other questions that look like meaningless details: knowing what an inode is and what syscall returns inode data for a path is something that someone with system-level C programming experience should know. stat(2) is far from being something obscure. Knowing what signal is sent by the kill(1) command is maybe slightly more on the trivia side IMO, but it's still a very well known fact.
A candidate is most likely not expected to know the answer to all of these questions. But failing in all of the categories is IMO a fairly strong red flag for someone interviewing for SRE, where in general people are usually expected to be comfortable with at least one of {networking, system administration, Linux internals}. In fact, this domain specific knowledge is the biggest differentiator between "standard" SWE and SRE-SWE, even though the lines get blurrier and blurrier.
This also indirectly answers this:
> things I would rather have my high level employees looking up rather than relying on a possibly faulty memory
You would have to be out of touch with the field for quite a while to forget such basic things. Which is likely something that you want to test for in such interviews. To go with a metaphor: if you claim to be a fluent English speaker on your resume, you can't be excused of "faulty memory" if you forget how to conjugate "to be" in the present tense. It's not something you forget easily, and if you did forget you most likely can't say you're fluent anymore.
Disclaimer: I was an SRE at Google for 2.5 years, but I'm not familiar with the early phases of the recruiting process.
How about the dozens of other seemingly qualified people who have complained about the google process?
And what's the other side of that? IE the literally tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands who haven't?
Again, i'm not saying there is no problem, i'm just saying this is probably not a great mechanism to evaluate whether there is a problem or not.
If you want actual usable data, this wouldn't be the way to get it, good or bad.
"Standard process" is what actually happens in the real world. Alas, standard process is to not tell him.
>But everyone in this entire thread seems to be making snap judgements without a lot of critical thinking. That makes me believe a lot of people here have a ton of pre-existing biases they are projecting onto this in one direction or the other (and you are, of course, welcome to claim i fall into this category too!)
Your story is also just one side of the story - actually, you weren't even involved so it's neither side. Still, you spend all your effort on saying why for example this guy's patents mean nothing and he's likely incompetent. I'd call that snap judgement, lack of critical thinking, and biased conjecture,
Inferring what's standard from a sample size of 1 (which is ~0.0001%) is very questionable.
> Still, you spend all your effort on saying why for example this guy's patents mean nothing and he's likely incompetent.
That is not at all what they where saying. They where saying that patents aren't conclusive evidence of competency.
For your second point, DannyBee focuses his efforts on discrediting this seemingly exceptionally qualified candidate, never yielding an inch from his position that Google is exceptional and can make no mistakes.
Infering what is "reality" from a sample size of ~0.0001% is clearly ridiculous. By that logic, it would be "standard" to be born a conjoined twin. Actually, it would be 10x as likely as what "standard" is.
> I'm clearly not talking about statistics.
You might benefit from doing so, though. It might help you realize what nonsense you are saying.
> DannyBee focuses his efforts on discrediting this seemingly exceptionally qualified candidate
No, this is factually incorrect. Repeating something factually incorrect doesn't make it more correct.
> never yielding an inch from his position that Google is exceptional and can make no mistakes.
You either can't or won't read. They very clearly acknowledged the possibility of a mistake several times in each post they made.
"That is not how we work. We will evaluate your abilities and then, if you pass, offer you a position on a team that we deem best fitting your skills."
Needless to say I have thanked him for his time and declined. I am not going to fly to another country to be grilled with stupid coding interviews only to be offered an entry level job on a team I am not interested in.
Another such thing was an invitation from Amazon's HR for an "accelerated testing session" where I was expected to go for a full day of coding tests (together with many others) and then they would pick who they invite for real interviews later where you may learn what sort of position they might offer you. Again, no idea what position/job you are interviewing for and wasted entire vacation day - for their convenience. System clearly targeting 20-somethings straight out of school. No, thanks.
The questions from the original article are familiar - but these are often external staffing agencies doing these pre-screens today. Google used to do it in-house with actually technically very competent HR staffers (I have done a few phone calls with someone in their California HQ back in 2002ish), but now if I get contacted by them every now and then it is always an external headhunter.
The staffing agencies employees tend to be very technically incompetent. Basically, they often have no idea whatsoever about the technical requirements for the position they are trying to fill. They only match keywords on the CVs in their database (often LinkedIn profiles, etc.) against the keywords in the job description, then they spam everyone that matches with an excited mail about having a "perfect match job". The matches are usually on the completely generic stuff like "C++", "Python" that everyone has on their CV, so in most cases the "dream job" is anything but - in a field the person knows nothing about or is not interested in.
I have been literally hounded for weeks by a headhunter once for a position that I had zero qualification for (Windows/.NET stuff - I was mostly Unix guy back then). It finally turned out that she wanted me only because I spoke/understood the Czech language. And she fully expected me to move to a "sweatshop" that company had in Czech Republic, trying to do a job I knew nothing about and paying less money that I had as teaching assistant at a university at the time. Some people are just nuts.
The phone screens are the same story - the headhunter has a script provided by their client with a bunch of keywords they are looking for in the answers. They are basically playing bingo with the candidate's answers, ticking off the "correct" keywords. Don't expect them to actually understand what they are asking. They can't - this week they are recruiting a Google engineer and next week they would be trying to fill a civil engineering position and a week later perhaps a chemistry lab technician.
I believe this is exactly what happened here. I have been in a similar situation before myself (not with Google). The hiring managers are complaining about how hard is it to hire talent, but why are they then wasting everyone's time with incompetent HR agencies, pointless phone screens that filter out even good candidates and stupid coding tests. Ask for references (I will be happy to provide), ask to see some code at the interview, check my public code (Github for ex), hire for a trial period. But give me a break with this ridiculous testing/screening nonsense. Nobody else except software engineers seems to have to put up with this type of crap.
> "i always take "transcripts" of interviews (or anything else) with a grain of salt"
I mean sure, a single instance of this might be overblown, exaggerated, or false in some way.
But there is an avalanche of reports like this, to the point where it's become widespread industry insider knowledge.
I enjoy working here, but the interviewing practices are such that I actively warn friends applying/being referred to temper their expectations of a repeatable/reliable process.
Most colleagues I've spoken to about this, including myself, have strong doubts we would have made the cut if we interviewed again - even though all are strong engineers with great perf records.
At what point do we start taking reports like these seriously? We don't have to accept every detail of the reporting as gospel, but there's clearly something here.
The problem with that approach is you end up with a very homogenous team of really smart, logical people, but without the balance of more creative, empathic types. Ideally, a well-functioning team will have both, and will have people from many different backgrounds and educations, because that's when you get true collaboration and innovation: by mixing unrelated disciplines.
I'd be marginally okay with it if the interviews actually selected for this sort of engineer! I've seen multiple people who fit this description to a T who flunked the process, hard.
If the goal here is "pick the hyper-mathy, deep-CS types out of the crowd" I'd argue the process isn't even very good at that.
As far as I understand this has been common vernacular since before my lifetime, I'm not usually one to welcome evolution of the base language but this one is before our lives we need to let it be.
> Spelled out as okeh, 1919, by Woodrow Wilson, on assumption that it represented Choctaw okeh "it is so" (a theory which lacks historical documentation); this was ousted quickly by okay after the appearance of that form in 1929.
1. Your interviewer didn't give you a good interview or follow guidelines. In interview training they tell you the first thing you must do to start an interview is to ask if the candidate would like to get some water / use the restroom, then break the ice before starting any questions (applicable also during phone screens).
2. Proper interviews actually are supposed to lean heavily toward real-world problem solving approach rather than arcane knowledge. For example, when I interview I look for rational decisions at every turn (not a random example but considering boundary cases, adding a new example to help you visualize the solution should give information gain rather than be something random). My questions are not math oriented, nor do they require deep knowledge of obscure theory. Based on what questions my coworkers ask, I know at least for my team this is not a correct characterization.
What we do test for: understanding of fundamental data structures and algorithms, ability to thrive in uncertainty (ask clarifying questions! state your assumptions!), ability to break a problem down and solve it from first principles.
Good interview questions are required to have multiple solutions.
And then you have the generalization at the end about creativity and diversity; in my limited experience we seem to get pretty decent diversity and even if there is some homogeneity (we need more women and minorities) it's certainly not the kind you described. No, it's not a bunch of mathy theory wizards writing code at Google, it's way more diverse than that. Not perfect, but not awful like you're describing.
Maybe they fail to do so but I do believe the goal is to test real world problem solving. However, I think they stray from specific language or domain knowledge because they want you to be able to work in different roles, since you don't have to interview again to switch teams.
From what I've read, the idea is to hire people who would be smart enough to learn any specific domain knowledge necessary, because the expectation is engineers might have to tackle problems they wouldn't have seen elsewhere. I don't really know whether thats true anymore as my impression is now Google just has a bunch of overqualified people though..
> The problem with that approach is you end up with a very homogenous team of really smart, logical people, but without the balance of more creative, empathic types. Ideally, a well-functioning team will have both, and will have people from many different backgrounds and educations, because that's when you get true collaboration and innovation: by mixing unrelated disciplines.
Can't disagree with you there, but its a weird assumption to say that people who are logical are not creative or empathetic. I do think that they hire for "Googliness" whatever that means, which may lead to a monoculture though.
In any case, I guess you can call me a Google fanboy. I don't agree with everything they do but I feel like bashing Google's (or most other company's) interview process is the cool thing to do here, but most people don't seem to have tried to understand why it is the way it is, and thus don't offer any true alternatives that meet the same goals nor do they reject the goals in the first place.
These processes select for recent CS graduates from a handful of universities where Google expends recruiting effort, and anyone not from that background mostly only gets in by blind luck or by knowing someone already in Google who can navigate them through getting hired there.
If you interview frequently, at least for SWE, this is certainly not how we go about things. ghire guidelines for SWE don't allow for questions like this, or behavior like this.
Is it possible this was an SRE interview? I guess, but it really sounds ungoogly and these questions sound like they don't give great signal. I'd be ashamed if this is how we hire SREs.
Is there really an "avalanche" of reports like this? Most negative reports I hear have to do with our SWE questions which tend to be difficult.
My guess is when the number of applications per position actually drops far enough that the false negative rate starts to hurt.
Until then, an interview processed optimized for avoiding false positives at all costs will persist. Totally makes sense for a company worth hundreds of billions though, can you imagine if they had a few more bad hires sneak in? Oh my god, it would destroy everything.
Frankly, if you are more qualified for a position, chances are you will be rejected because your interviewers will fear for their own job security.
I've always found that type of logic strange, though. Wouldn't you want someone who was better than you currently are on your team? Wouldn't you be able to learn from them?
I went through three acquisitions and never had any interview, besides the set of meetings for each of us to decide to go along with the acquisition or get a severance package.
I was immediately asked which department I wanted to join and why. I said, "Err, not sure, how about SRE?". To be told, "Oh, well that's not my area, let me ask them."
Shortly after that I got a curt message saying "Thank you for applying to Google. We have no vacancies that would suit you right now, thanks for applying, goodbye."
Somewhat bemused by the whole process (you contacted me, dude!), I went about my day.
However, I immediately tell them the role that I have, to avoid the whole, "We have no vacancies that would suit you right now" answer. Seems like their recruiters should have done that up front, to save you and themselves some time.
My second interview well, that was a whole different bucket of problems.
Two years on, I think I made the right call.
I got an email a week later saying thanks but no thanks with zero explanation. I had gotten everything right, what went wrong? So I had some of my Google friends track down the interviewer and ask. Apparently I didn't continue forward because I didn't finish my Set implementation...
I've had Google contact me on occasion since then. I have not re-applied / re-interviewed with them. Their interview process is already bad enough.
Based on his LinkedIn profile, I don't think anyone at Google would have thought of him as a "director of engineering". Being an "R&D director" at some unknown company at 24 is entirely un-comparable to a director at Google, and since then he's worked at his own very small company. He was probably a candidate for Senior SRE.
The fact that there's a machine instruction for it does makes it a bad question.
His answer was to look at 64 bits at a time and do a [0] Kernighan style count. The "correct" answer was an 8-bit lookup table. Which is right is going to be highly dependent on the data and the architecture you are using.
[0] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12380478/bits-counting-al...
Failure of recognising overqualified candidate from under qualified is a failure on the recruiter side, not the candidate side.
Recruiter is of course allowed to say "I'm sorry, but you are well overqualified for this position". In this case he was falsely recognised as somebody under qualified.
It's simpler when having a non technical person asking the questions and I imagine it would lower false negatives. Frankly I don't care personally but it seems like most people would like this better.
I eventually refused the position without going on-site just because of how ridiculous the questions/replies were (and frankly, because I had another good offer elsewhere, but it did contribute greatly).
While my experience wasn't as bad by a long stretch, I can see how this is plausible. In particular I immediately figured out that the recruiter wasn't very technically inclined, had a "heres a list of correct responses" spreadsheet to help him, and had very little time to waste.
Due to taking that into account - I was always accommodating instead of confrontational (which got me more interviews, which were better/with real engineers, yay - though not great either). Had I been confrontational, pointing out mistakes and misunderstandings, I'm sure it'd have gone pretty bad.
A team gets pressure to hire, but they don't want to.
A team has a great internal candidate but can't push it through without going through external candidates. (Expecting any director couldn't answer these -- which they shouldn't).
A team can get 2 for 1. Usually an H1B situation, which has the extra benefit of chaining the 2 candidates to the company. Former H1B employees love this option.
A team has a 'friend' in mind.
I honestly think, this isn't a question of a dumb recruiter, more like a way to just push something through. The recruiter was probably taken to lunch with a high five. This is very normal. I wouldn't freakout that they have a 'dumb process' you need to read between the lines here. The saddest part, this pawn gets a "PASSED" on his record at Google -- but it was just internal politics.
Are you saying google pays their H1B employees half of what they do others?
I've never bothered to apply to Google. But if this happened to me, I'd just walk away. You don't know me, but you don't want that :-)
> none of these are on or related to the "director of engineering" interview guidelines or sheets
> 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".
It's one thing to blindly apply a simple questionnaire without thinking about the answers that come back, and yet another thing to do it with a questionnaire that's doesn't even get stuff right.
For what it's worth, lots of other companies seem to use almost the exact same process.
The screener is the wrong person to walk down Pedantry Lane or Hexadecimal Packets Street and that's the sort of thing you save for the actual interview. But yes, I agree that it's shitty that the incentive is to answer for the test instead of the exact truth. (I wasn't extremely supportive of the interviewee once he turned slightly sarcastic and rattled off hexadecimal bytes instead of just saying "SYN" and "ACK," though.)
As an unrelated addendum, I'm intrigued by the following four things:
1) The author wrote a Web server and framework, G-WAN
2) I've seen G-WAN advertise itself questionably in the past w/r/t perf
3) gwan.com is powered by G-WAN
4) Under Hacker News load, the entire gwan.com domain is hard down
His response:
> in hexadecimal: 0x02, 0x12, 0x10 – literally "synchronize" and "acknowledge".
What do you think SYN and ACK stand for? Could it be "synchronize" and "acknowledge"? Moreover his point that knowing the bytes is more useful when you're looking at packet dumps is valid.
"in hexadecimal: 0x02, 0x12, 0x10".
Except that you did draw a conclusion.
On the other hand, the recruiter did not tell me whether I got the right answer (or I didn't miss any). It was pretty clearly a scripted initial phone screen with someone who wasn't a programmer.
Oh, and they didn't ask anything truly ridiculous like the QuickSort question.
Actually, this is a super-bad assumption, pre-screening questions, etc, are all public to google internally. There are no magic internal-to-recruiting parts to the questions, and they are in fact, listed as SRE pre-screening questions, so ...
returns a few hits, including:
https://www.glassdoor.com/Interview/Linux-system-call-for-in...
which lists the question as "system call for inode data" - which is importantly different from a system call to return an actual inode.
This post says something similar: http://gregbo.livejournal.com/182506.html
"There were some questions I just didn't remember the answers to, such as "What system call gives all the information about an inode?" and "What are the fields in an inode?""
(Argh, the blog post is down, so I can't compare some of the others, but several of them seemed to have been changed in ways that made the question itself seem wrong.)
((Thanks to leetrout below for bopping me on the head with the google cache. Next bit added thanks to said bop.))
Another one: The blog post lists "what is the name of the KILL signal?", but googling for: google sre interview questions kill signal
turns up this post on glassdoor: https://www.glassdoor.com/Interview/site-reliability-enginee...
Which lists the question as "What signal does the "kill" command send by default?"
That matches much more the answer SIGTERM that the interviewer was described as insisting on.
That suggests a few likely possibilities: (a) The interviewer misread the questions; (b) There was a horrible communication failure between the interviewer and the interviewee; (c) The interviewee failed to actually listen to the questions before answering.
I have no information with which to assign weights to those possibilities, but all of them seem more likely than "the interview questions themselves are actually this horrible" (they're not as broken as the blog post made them out to be. After writing this, I looked.)
I managed to find them and I don't work in recruiting, they are for SRE pre-screens. The guy misunderstood most of the questions which is why he failed and then worded them incorrectly on his blog, it wasn't the fault of the questions or the interviewer.
Also at the end the recruiters attitude aweful. Like what is that, he was reading answers from a paper, couldn't make valid arguments back to the candidate and at the end turns and says to the candidate "sorry my paper says you don't know this and that, and goodbye?"
A recruiter who was already giving the guy the wrong interview, and whose job revolves essentially around HR and sales, made mistakes in asking a series of technical questions.
An expert with decades of relevant technical experience misunderstands and confuses basic networking and system topics.
A person fails to read a question verbatim.
A person who has been the "smartest person in the room" for decades has an inflated view of his fluency on a topic and makes mistakes in his favor when he tries to reconstruct the questions from memory.
My recruiter was reading these questions off of a sheet of paper, but when we had discrepancies in our answers and she would say something like "It says here an inode holds metadata", and I would respond with something like "oh, metadata and attributes are the same thing", she would say "oh, well you are correct then!"
I made it to the first phone interview but that's where the path ended. I was bummed for a little but then remembered I prefer small business anyways :)
To solve difficult technical discussions, it's important to be able to restate the other side's arguments in the light most favorable to THEM, while the candidate was entirely focused on paraphrasing the interviewer's argument in the least sympathetic way. Would you want to work with a person like that?
A "different" job, several grades lower in responsibility (and pay). Without in any way prefacing him, beforehand.
Is that the way things usually work in the Google hiring process?
I breezed through these kinds of questions with the recruiter since I'm younger have a fairly fresh CS background.
Then, my first SRE staff interviewer primarily asked how I would build a data center on the moon. I work on the FreeBSD kernel and TCP full time. I know what BDP, window sizing, head of line blocking, etc are way beyond what a typical SRE would and how communication latency would cause major issues. That confused the questioner. I can't think of anything else I'd have said wrong, my background is systems engineering and I know more about power distribution, HVAC, and data center design than I care to. The lady was skeptical of my answers and it felt really humiliating even though I would rate myself more knowledgeable than my questioner, because of the candidate/interviewer positioning and failure.
The next man, on another day, asked me a bunch of math trivia like estimating the angles on the hands of a clock and orders of magnitude guesses of a small item like a marble to fill a room. I told him I was no longer interested in working for Google and he was really startled because "he didn't get to ask me systems questions yet".. well, good luck with that.
Everyone was really sad at that point, including the recruiter. Nobody from Google has contacted me again, which is a relief. I found the entire process gross.
Don't get me wrong, I'm guessing you know your stuff, but you also strike me as someone who may likely have failed on culture fit down the line. Interviewers are often more sensitive to attitude than they ever are to aptitude, and for good reason, your HVAC knowledge may be irrelevant once you discover the custom designs in use behind closed doors, and a bad attitude toward learning where you're weak can be a much more fatal problem for a new hire.
Last year when I was job hunting I kept getting fizzbuz-style phone screens, even from companies who'd specifically contacted me because they knew who I was and what my skills/experience were, because they have to be sure to filter out those unqualified core committers of software they use on a daily basis.
Anyway, I got asked the "write a palindrome checker" question multiple times in those screens. I guess more companies than I thought have a Department of Palindrome Quality Assurance these days. But after about the fifth time, I just started going overboard on the question to make a clear point to the interviewers. I got a pretty good patter down where I could write out the code while describing all the random quirks phone screeners never have heard of: I'd start lecturing about combining characters, right-to-left directional shifts, the tradeoffs of considering solely Unicode code points versus graphemes, using the character database to identify categories of characters to ignore when considering whether a string is palindromic, etc.
Interviewers who took that poorly did not get my further cooperation. Interviewers who took it well (by being positive/polite about it, or even admitting that yes, this kind of phone screen is a waste of everyone's time when you already know you're interviewing someone who can code) got to talk a bit more. But I ended up accepting an offer from a place that actually worked to make their interview process better then this, and which continues to evolve it all the time.
For internal hires, I convinced people to come work for me that I had immense respect for by using casual conversation and pitching the idea and vision for a new operating systems team.
I've found this is also a classy way to hire external people. I've since hired people off freebsd-jobs@ mailing list and twitter by being upfront about the good and bad of working at this company. No trick questions, just a conversation about what we like to work on. This was easy because I had an idea of what they have accomplished by their commit logs.
Most recently I hired two women, masters students, for summer internships. This was very different because I had no idea what the candidates had done as coursework or projects beyond a simple resume. I again used casual conversation, no trick questions. I posed some real world situations, passively seeing if they understood concepts like deadlock, manual memory management, indirection, and had very good working CS/OS vocabulary. This eliminated most of the other candidates, and it was pretty clear who had slogged through their OS and networking classes without passion. I let each person tell me about projects they worked on which really excited them. One had done Linux USB driver on her own time, among other interesting things. The other had implemented a scheduler and file system on a teaching OS as part of her course work. Both worked out phenomenally and both have patches in the FreeBSD.org source tree from the 2 month internship experience. I am very proud of this, and of my team for mentoring them so successfully.
The people I hired were often confused; "That's it?" at the end of the phone or in person interview. They thought they had done something wrong because they are so used to being sweated for the sake of being sweated.
I am now convinced this is the only ethical way to build teams and hire -- start with some seasoned vets then grow new talent while refining and reinforcing shared values.
I don't really see what the stereotypical SV tech interview accomplishes. Blind leading the blind. Leadership is piss poor in this industry.
> 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".
I get that you are happy at Google, that you want to defend your employer. But implying the guy's a liar or a fool does not help. If anything, it makes me more likely to believe that Google has something to be touchy about here.
Even if you're correct and he's merely saying something generically true about almost any concerning story, him saying it in the context of the post reads to me as a veiled accusation.
For example, suppose you posted an open-source project of yours here. If I were to comment, "Open-source projects are often half-finished, buggy messes," how would that seem? It is factually true; randomly looking at GitHub projects is enough to show that. But in context, it's an unkind thing to say because encourages people to look at your project as one of them.
Hope this doesn't turn out that costly for Google. But I'd be happy if it does, if it is the way the interview was really conducted.
This makes the most sense to me, why would a director of engineering be responsible for getting Google back online if it went down when there are SREs.
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.
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.
There is absolutely no purpose to knowing off the top of your head how long an ethernet address is, or even what system call will retrieve an inode (his bickering over stat() "filling in" rather than "returning" was bogus, for what it's worth). The top Google search result for each of these questions has the answer. Knowing these things isn't part of being a practicing programmer; knowing how to find out is.
Those functions return a error code, you pass in a stat structure and the function populates that structure.
He was saying (correctly), that they don't return (in the classic C sense) the inode. They return an error code.
To me that is a big difference...
int lstat(const char path, struct stat buf);
vs stat* lstat(const char *path);
2 completely different functions.
Btw, that is the only thing I really disagreed with OP on, the rest seemed just ridiculous.
It's a technical interview, the question should have been technically correct. "What function passes by-reference copies of inodes?"
"lsof just prints open files... you would use netstat, not lsof."
I tried correcting him, but he wouldn't listen and ended the call soon after.
I never received a call back.
~ $ lsof -a -n -c chrome -iTCP:443 | head -2 #sanitized output
COMMAND PID USER FD TYPE DEVICE SIZE/OFF NODE NAME
chrome 1234 me 12u IPv4 12345 0t0 TCP 127.0.0.1:12345->127.0.0.2:https (ESTABLISHED)I personally wouldn't want to work with someone who wasn't able to understand what I mean (in such an obvious case, at least) and wasn't able to answer to that meaning.
(Of course, I'd also personally prefer someone who would point out that this is inaccurate, but do so in a charming and off-hand way, to make me feel comfortable. A high bar, maybe, but for a director that's definitely a bar they should clear).
Remember, you have to walk through the interview thru OP's mindset and how he took into consideration the interviewer's analness.
lstat has the same signature as stat: it passes the stat structure back through an output pointer.
Q: What does lstat return?
A: A struct
>> Wrong, it returns an error code
IIRC, you can return structs from functions in C. You have to access the values in the returned struct with dot notation, of course, like point.x .
Pre-ANSI C may not have had this, but later, it did. Remember reading it in the 2nd (ANSI) edition of the Kernighan & Ritchie C book, and also used it myself in some programs.
https://www.google.co.in/?q=can+you+return+a+structure+in+c
Edit:
Might want to consider the cost of copying, depending on the perf requirements, size of the struct, whether the function call is in a tight loop, etc.
These functions return information about a file.OS X: (OK, so I lied about the "fine" part)
The stat() function obtains information about the file pointed to by path
Get status information on a fileWhy he's being interviewed for that position is a different question entirely, and I can imagine Google being totally right or totally wrong.
Take, for example, the sorting question. "Why is QuickSort the best sorting algorithm?" The answer being looked for was, "It has the best Big O."
And this is wrong. Its average case is O(n log(n)). Its worst case is O(n^2). Which do you call its big-O? Moving on, the average case of O(n log(n)) is matched by a wide variety of sorting algorithms. How do you choose one?
Here is a better answer.
QuickSort is a very simple to implement algorithm which achieves the lowest average number of operations on a randomly sorted list. Which is why it is so widely adopted despite sometimes being very slow.
However Timsort appears to be the fastest general purpose sorting algorithm for the mix of random and partially sorted lists seen in practice.
When I tend to notice that sorting is slow, generally that's a larger workload where some type of merge sort would be appropriate.
For instance, perhaps the interviewer asked "What makes quicksort a good sorting method," instead of "What makes quicksort the best sorting method"—a very small difference in phrasing. In that case, the answer of "It's not always the best, or even suitable" is still technically true, but much more wrong. (And an answer like the one you started with, "Its average case is O(n log (n)), its worst case is O(n^2)," would have been enough to pass... but sitting on the phone and arguing about storage topology is itself a failure.)
As I mentioned in another comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12702130 , my (five-year-old, faulty) memory of Google's SRE phone interview is that they asked another question here with a very small but important phrasing difference: "What is the signal sent by the kill command" instead of "What is the kill signal". If you make that change, the interviewee's answer of "SIGKILL" becomes wrong, and the interviewer is right to insist on SIGTERM (which would otherwise make no sense). It is a quite literal game of telephone.
(Again, I can also imagine Google being totally wrong and the interviewer mangling the questions.)
For question 5, you asked about an inode, and were told about an inumber, and got back an answer insisting that the inode was an index.
For question 6, maybe change "inode" to "information in the inode". The interviewee still has not figured out the distinction between an inode and an inumber.
For questions 7 and 8, apply the changes I suggested.
At what point do you decide that the interviewee is hopelessly arrogant and not worth your further time? And how do you get them off the phone gracefully?
Maybe around question 10, when they're quoting bits to show off and not saying the words that would actually let them communicate with other engineers like "SYN" and "ACK"?
No ill will is required on the interviewee's side, unless you consider refusing to waste time on bad candidates "ill will".
The conversation that I'd have to reconstruct has a very combative interviewee. Which would also fit said interviewee deciding to write up the article that I read. Which would mean that Google dodged a bullet.
I find it interesting to note that his site is down. There are a lot of possible causes, but it isn't good advertising for his webserver software.
But... the kill command is the command to send arbitrary signals. It sends them all.
I know this is irrelevant to the larger point of your post, and I'm sure that you know this already, but the worst case is the big-O. This is just another reason why "big-O" is not the most helpful thing to discuss in practice.
Big-O is a way of categorizing the growth of mathematical functions. Those functions can represent anything. It is wrong to talk about the big-O of an algorithm without specifying what you are measuring. Be it average operations, worst case operations, average memory, worst case memory, amortized average time, amortized average memory, and so on.
It happens to be that when we talk informally, we're usually talking about the worst case we are willing to think about. Quicksort's worst case is a sorted set, so we think of that as O(n^2). But then we turn around and cheerfully call a hash lookup O(1) because its O(n) worst case is incredibly rare in practice.
Thanks for correcting me!
I thought you were right at first but then realized what was going on. This is a pretty subtle point and mostly uninteresting for well-understood algorithms like quicksort. But one slightly less subtle point is that big-theta isn't average case, it is the combination of big-O and big-omega, i.e., bounded from above and below (possibly with different constant factors) by the same asymptotic behavior.
But, obvs, the answer is that you Bing it.
I think you're onto something greater. Maybe Google should hire more smart people who were developing in the 1990's as they're a nice, middle ground between ambitious, young folks and the been-there-done-that greybeards. Them realizing such people already know all the shit they're trying to teach their developers might be way to sneak older people into these tech firms. Haha.
In a recruiting situation, if the recruiter is going all "right and wrong" on the interviewee, they should know these dirty details.
I also disagree on the ethernet address length. You know how long IPv4 addresses are, you know how long IPv6 addresses are, why would it be so extraordinary to also know how long MAC adresses are?
I think it could be useful to find out in an interview whether the applicant knows stuff because they have actually implemented low-level code and gained an intricate understanding, or whether they just did used some high level APIs and were never interested in more details than "I have a handle right here, it does all I need". For some positions that would be an important distinction.
Personally, if I were interviewing people, I'd hire the guy that explains something to me that I did not know, but that I find interesting and would have attempted to understand, too.
While I agree, I have seen interviewers where if he answered "fstat" they would have come back with "Wrong! fstat passes the structure back by reference, it does not return it!"
With this style of interview I can't blame him for thinking it might be a trick question and then trying to explain why he didn't say those other functions as an answer.
The rejoinder, of course, is that it's probably misguided to structure your recruiting around a spam filter.
Maybe I'm a bad programmer, but I don't feel like I would be a better one with that specific fact committed to memory. I dunno.
I do plenty of interviews, and so I do have some sympathy for the idea that some overwhelming majority of applicants simply cannot perform even the most basic coding tasks but are somehow trying to sneak in anyway, but at the same time I can't escape the suspicion that a lot of the stories are actually from badly-designed or badly-calibrated interviews gone off the rails.
I absolutely believe that the article we're discussing here gives a fair view of a Google phone screen, since I've been through it too and even got asked some of the same questions. The only reason I "passed" was that I recalibrated way, way down to meet the expectations and the technical understanding of the recruiter I was talking to (who did very clearly seem to be reading off a prepared script). This was surprising since Google had reached out to me to ask me to apply, which one would think indicates a confidence in basic technical skills, but if I hadn't caught that and adjusted how I was interpreting and answering the random trivia they threw at me, I likely wouldn't have passed the screen and would have been labeled just another impostor trying to sneak into a job I'm unqualified for.
So when I hear someone else talking about all the "unqualified" applicants they get, I can't help wondering how many really were qualified applicant talking to unqualified interviewer using unqualified interview process.
(disclosure: I don't work for Google, don't ever intend to work for Google, and in fact hung up on a later screening call out of frustration with the way they ran their process, which at least finally got their recruiters to stop spamming me)
My friends and I used to spend bar nights drinking over torturous interview questions (yes, I have always been this nerdy). For instance: we had a gruesome sequence of questions on how to implement the fastest possible traceroute that you could only clear if you knew about a trick using the IP timestamp option.
Later, I got (what I thought was) smarter about interviewing, and moved to more surgical questions. I'd ask candidates to debug a C program that segfaulted in malloc, or ask them to describe the utility functions they carried with them from project to project.
After taking over recruiting for a company that really needed to hire at a specific clip in order to balance sales and delivery, I'm embarrassed that I thought I was interviewing effectively with stuff like this.
You can't learn about someone's capabilities by putting them on the spot with trivia questions.
But that's not the point of these questions. These questions are a 5-10min phone pre-screen before getting to the actual interviews. They test if the candidate has experience in a given field, not if they can search for information or what are the precise bounds of their capabilities.
It's trivia, but it's trivia that is a reasonably high confidence proxy for experience in e.g. network programming/design (resp. other fields). If someone claims they have networking experience and don't know SYN/SYN-ACK/ACK it's in my opinion a large red flag.
The ostensible reason they get deployed (I say "ostensible" because we all know that in reality the on-site interview consists of the same stupid kinds of questions) is to keep the employer from wasting time conducting more sophisticated interviews for candidates who have no hope of passing. But that's dumb for at least two big reasons:
* The filters obviously reject candidates who would do well on more serious challenges --- worse, they do it insidiously, because you can't tell that they're rejecting good people, only that you're seeing fewer bozos, which makes them look like they work. In reality, a new norm has arisen where the most qualified candidates get to skip these processes entirely, because we all know they're a crap-shoot and don't want to lose good people.
* Properly administered work sample challenges actually take less employer time than these stupid trivia screens do. That means there's literally no purpose to the trivia screens whatsoever; they do nothing but harm.
In my last comment, I just wrote off the top of my head a sketch for a work sample test that addresses the same concern as the dumb TCP/IP trivia quiz from the original post. It took me I think something like 30 seconds to come up with it. Think about how you'd score that (remember: the bar here is "must be more predictive than that dumb trivia question"). I'm thinking something along the lines of "run the code and see if it opens a new TCP connection".
Assuming your team has enough sophistication to build work sample challenges like this, try to justify the trivia interviews. I think you can't.
SRE's are hired to fix outages and other problems asap, knowing trivia is very important then since at that point you might be losing a million dollars per second.
Linux:
int stat(const char *path, struct stat *buf);
stat() stats the file pointed to by path and fills in buf.
int stat(const char *restrict path, struct stat *restrict buf);
The stat() function obtains information about the file pointed to by path.
Read, write or execute permission of the named file is not
required, but all directories listed in the path name leading to the file must be searchable.
If you're interviewing for the rare 1% case where the job will actually require you to tinker with a TCP stack, then by all means ask about those details. For 99% of programming jobs today, it's irrelevant trivia used as nothing more than an ego measuring device.
I feel like I've seen 2-3 articles alone in the last month that has rediscovered head-of-line blocking and UDP. I'd say 1/10 engineers I talk to even know what cache aware datastructures are.
The thing that separates someone who can just string together whatever they find on npm to people who build real systems is this deep understanding. You're not going to need this for your standard LoB apps. However if you're in the business of building software you're definitely going to want people like this.
Trying to find the TCP stack engineer to build your app is like hiring a petrochemical engineer to do oil changes. If your pockets are as deep as Google's, yes, you can do that, but it's by no means necessary.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how we ended up with npm.
Whatever this thing... this... stringing together a 100 random github projects to get a webpage that kinda of works about 80% of the time is called -- please let's agree not to call it "software engineering".
That said I can't recall any of that stuff mattering in the stuff I do for work for quite some time and most of it is a google search away.
That interview was just weird, it was like asking the boiler pressure for a steam train to someone who was a master engineer working on electric trains.
Applicant Doctor: "They're double membrane-bound organelles found in all eukaryotic organisms, commonly between 0.75 and 3μm in diameter, that generate most of the cell's supply of adenosine triphosphate"
Recruiter: "No. They are the powerhouse of the cell".
"Well, it depends what color model you are using, which differentiates between additive and subtractive color mixing, the medium used (print, screen, etc.)...
No. It's Red, Green, and Blue.
/colorblind
She was more artsy, I was insistent that the primary colors were RGB, she was insistent that they were RYB. We googled. We were both right in some senses.
I haven't brought it up yet because we once had a fight over whether that thing you put outside your shower is called a bath mat or a bath rug (Both are correct in different circumstances)
It reminds me of a classic Dilbert. https://goo.gl/images/7DhC9f
Like this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yu44JRTIxSQ
'a'
No. The right answer is 'A'. We will stop here because it's obvious that you don't have the necessary skills.
Doctors know a ton of random crap tangentially related to their jobs that they were forced to memorize.
This isn't even my domain, but I remember some of this stuff. I had to dig in to this area years ago, and was knee-deep in that level for several months debugging and configuring stuff. Some of it stays with you, even if you're not there any more.
For someone applying for a director of engineering, I'm kind of split as to whether this should be required "off the cuff" knowledge. Would certainly help, but seems it would depend on the culture of the company - how hands-on they expect director-level folks to be - some companies seem to want that, some don't.
In interviews, I've had people give answers I'm not familiar with. The easy thing to do is to ask them to explain how their answer works. You get to vet whether it seems legit, and as a bonus see how good they are at communication in a genuine teaching moment.
What's completely wrong with the situation is that the recruiter was saying "wrong" when he was giving detailed answers. The right solution is to have a non-skilled recruiter take careful notes, asking the candidate to repeat if necessary, in the cases where the candidate insists they know the answer.
Then only in cases where the candidate can't answer a question should it be marked as "wrong." In other cases the answers should be run past someone knowledgeable.
I've gone through a phone interview with Google myself, and it was nothing like this: I spoke with a real, skilled engineer, and there was nothing like a "gotcha" question where I had to guess the exact term he meant. Well, except where he asked "I bet you know what my next question is" and I didn't guess "How can the algorithm be faster?" But he didn't count that against me. :)
(Assuming they get no false positives, which, thinking about it, is a big assumption)
I may have gotten a technical interviewer because I can list a half dozen people who know me who work at Google, most of whom can directly vouch for me.
Not sure why the OP got an unskilled reviewer, but if they didn't list references inside the company, they may have been thrown in the "random unknown applicant" bucket.
Not surprised by the questions. Most are [somewhat] common and not particular challenging.
I am surprised by the stupid counter-answers from the recruiter thought. This guy should not be giving phone interview.
I did not see any argument here from the statement in the article. The recruiter clearly had little clue about what is right and wrong. And the way the recruiter assess the answer by throwing right/wrong seems more rude to me compared to the author "wanting to be right".
Please do not speculating based on something that is not present in the article.
I had done similar interviews before, the recruiters I worked with did not show the same level incompetence as this one. When I want to be more specific on details, they would suggest that they think it's enough and move on. Not like this recruiter who just throw a 'wrong'.
Are you talking about the recruiter?
I'm fine working with non-technical people (or who don't know any given field), but I wouldn't be fine working with those people if they were insistent that they did know about these things about which they actually had no clue, or if they were in a position where they really need to know this stuff.
I have coworkers who don't know how to use the command line, but they aren't engineers and they don't try to tell me what commands to run when I pull up a console, so it's fine. If they keep insisting that I should use "dir" and that "ls" is wrong, that would be a problem. If they were the CTO, that would be a problem.
When we hire engineers for customer support, the non-technical operations guy interviews them, but he always has at least one engineer do a portion of the interview because he knows he's not fully qualified to judge someone's technical chops.
The OP isn't being condescending just because someone didn't know stuff. It's because someone didn't know stuff, but because they acted like they did. You want to be insufferable, insist you know better than the experts in a given field.
The medical recruiter asks to see the diploma. The doctor shows his degree and gets the job.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_MD_and_DO_in_the...
Uh, my main languages are PHP and Python (high level stuff) and I'm a student (not someone with 10 years of experience) but I knew that. 3 bytes for the vendor block, 3 bytes for the device.
> Or what the actual SYN/ACK etc tcp flags are?
Yeah the actual bytes, who ever uses that? A MAC address I've seen plenty of times in my life as hex, and I've seen the TCP setup flags being exchanged plenty of times in Wireshark and looked up the hex once when I was implementing TCP from scratch, but I still wouldn't expect anyone to know that.
> You just need to know what they're used for
Agreed on that. I wouldn't blame anyone for not knowing the size of a MAC address, I just didn't think that one is that obscure.
That is why you know the answer. Come back in 10 years and let us know if you still know it. What you think might be mainstream in a computer science class are rarely used in application. And if they are they can be easily looked up.
I used to know the exact effective distance of a CATV cable when I was a student. Useful? Sure. Something I need to remember for the rest of my life? Definitely not.
As another example, in 17+ years writing ISO level 7 programs, I have never once needed to use the Mac address.
I've never taken a CS class, and I still know it. I've just stared at enough packet dumps and debugged enough issues that it happens to stick.
I think it's a stupid question to ask as a screener, as it tests familiarity with trivia. It's the kind of thing I'd be happy to see that somebody knew, but it's never something I'd downcheck them for not knowing. It could just mean, as in your case, that there deep knowledge is somewhere else.
We are all a product of our environment. And there is certainly a chance in 10 years the OP will still know how many bytes are in a MAC address. I only mentioned computer science based on the "student" part of the quote.
Personally I've been spoiled by working on higher level stuff so if I do look at a packet dump I usually filter the packet headers out. But again, we're a product of our environment and asking questions that a reasonable skilled engineer might go their entire career without knowing the answer to except in that interview is a bit suspect and will likely disqualify people that would be otherwise great for the job.
Maybe 10 years from now I'll have forgotten everything about the hex/binary/octal representations of numbers, but I certainly hope not!
Uh actually my classes didn't teach me that. Side projects did.
The point still stands though. First, it is much easier to have side projects when you are in school so the causal relationship might still be there just one step removed. But the more important point I was making was that school or a side project or even a project at work, if people go 10 years without using it, they forget things.
As an aside, you may want to drop the "Uh" in-front of your sentences. It conveys a certain tone that I'm not sure you are doing intentionally.
Thanks for the refresher! I knew that too when I was in college. Good luck remembering that 5 years from now :)
I did not learn this because some course demanded I learn a text book by heart. I'm not doing that kind of theoretical university. I knew that particular thing because I look at a lot of packet captures.
This rubbish flies in our industry since we are not professional engineers.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principles_and_Practice_of_Eng...
> Nonsense.
s/\./:
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.
Come on Hacker News, I know you hate recruiters, but do you really think that happened?
The fact that several Google people posting here literally can't believe this is true shows how fucked up their process is.
I was more impressed by how simply he explained many of them in real-world terms. Especially countering Big O. That plus what he's already built indicates he's exactly the kind of person to direct the sort of projects they're building. That they filtered him with this garbage Q&A speaks volumes about Google's ineffective hiring. Plus, indicates what kind of people might have made it into the organization.
2) We are getting description from him. When I interviewed at Google, they asked me to prove that P is equal to NP, and I did, but they said that it took me longer than allotted 45 minutes and I didn't get an offer.
The pain of being tossed out onto the pavement would totally be worth it.
I've been looking at them on NICs, adding them to DHCP databases and using them for simple authorizations in iptables (and prior equivalents) since, oh, 1992 or thereabouts. They weren't new then.
It would take me a moment to count them in my head, that's all. "aa, bb, cc, dd, ee, ff -- that's six bytes".
Which is really bad, when they're trying to hire people for a job where thinking is the fundamental skill...
When I was an interviewer at Google it felt like 90%+ of interviews were with candidates who had less than four years of experience. Probably half were fresh out of college. After the fifth candidate in a row who can't do simple recursion or algorithmic analysis (and I mean simple) you get pretty discouraged. In one phone interview I got to interview an experienced engineer with over twenty years of experience in C. He completed the question I usually have to spend 45 minutes on with a new-grad in <10 minutes. It was probably my favorite interview of all time because I actually got to discuss the subtleties and he reaffirmed that I could maintain high standards.
As to high standards, you are testing for things that have very little to do with someone being good at the job. High arbitrary standards often remove the most talented people who generally don't have the same background as you.
EX: Suppose you where looking for a CEO, well having a collage degree seems like a reasonable requirement. However, a surprising number the best CEOs don't.
None of that was a reasonable predictor of my future performance at Google. You would have filtered out a perfectly good candidate (and this is, IMHO, the biggest issue is that Google rejects a number of people who would be great employees with its early filters). I can't say I have a better system.
The only interviews that made any sense for the time I got hired were the ones with the specific team members I was going to join. Once we got to chatting it was pretty clear I was a good technical fit for the team.
I still want to emphasize I don't have a solution to the high false negative rate in the pre-screening procecss.
Still, it shows a massive company trying to streamline some things and failing terribly. I personally wouldn't want to work at Google today. What might have been cool once is now nothing but a standard large company like IBM or Amazon. There's a great Quora post by some former Google people that say as much.
"Look I get the gist of what this screening is trying to do but please write down my answers and feed them to the technical staff who authored this Q&A and have them verify their misunderstandings and have them get back to me please. I am very confident you all have subtle details mixed up and could benefit by a strong candidate who understands such details with a higher level of fidelity."
Guess its another loss given to the recruitment focus on avoiding false positives over false negatives.
Depends on what you actually do in your job, I suppose. If you use that information regularly or troubleshoot networks regularly you would soon enough memorize it.
> and if you need the specifics, you'll find out with a single search.
Someone doing network programming _does_ need the specifics.
This interview must be some kind of a mistake. It's like testing Richard Feynman's knowledge with questions about multiplication table (where you have wrong answers on your table).
It's so stupid that it's almost not possible to laugh.
ERR_CONNECTION_REFUSED
That last sentence is important.
It's what happens when you get old. There were commonly C compilers on 8, 16, 20, 24 and 32 bit architectures, some big-endian, some not, and you couldn't google things in 20 seconds back in those bad old days when old farts were building the networks that would be used to connect to us all to google.
(And he has apparently been in networking since)
Hmm, let me think. Somebody working with routers for 10+ years.
> ..what the actual SYN/ACK etc tcp flags are?
Same.
I mean, these things are just as familiar to me as grade school multiplication, by now..I bet there's things familiar to you which I couldn't even be bothered to memorise and instead had to turn to a search engine for.
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.
Dale Carnegie wouldn't have approved, I'm sure.
1. The author of the post says that this was a phone call. That means that this, more than likely, is not a transcript of the call, but a paraphrase. The entire tone of the post lends itself to the author thinking that they're "correct" and that the interviewer was just a rude, monosyllabic simpleton.
2. The interview ended immediately after the author started to argue. Instead of trying to relate to the person and simplify their answers after the first few super-technical answers weren't accepted, they trudged on with the attitude of "this person has no idea what they're talking about and this is stupid" rather than "I'm clearly overshooting the mark here, maybe I should try and simplify the answers".
I disagree. The Q&A process isn't indicative of almost any skills on the job except patients when your time is being wasted in a formal process. He'd have to have memorized every trivial, algorithmic fact plus their textbook (not real-world!) answers with no further knowledge or answers. Such a candidate is not valuable in any function in Google unless they're trying out for an IT version of Rainman. Not even for HR since they read a sheet instead of memorize it themselves. ;)
Instead, the interviewer asks algorithmic questions, gets great answers, explains they're not on his sheet, and rejects the person. This is the total opposite of kind of social problems an engineering lead or project manager deals with. Plus, the requirement of keep guessing until your answer matches a sheet doesnt reflect how goals or requirements are done.
If this was assessing social or management skills, then it's the worst method I've seen to assess it. It still is a horrible result.
More adequate approach will be to find the way to bypass this interview, by finding the right contacts who have the adequate expertise and can make the hiring decisions.
This situation is like trying to sell new fridge or delivery van to a waiter in restaurant, who was instructed to talk to business visitors while management is away. He was indeed put in charge, but he can do nothing for you or worse, communicate your offer to his boss in a wrong way, so you have to escalate - to find the contacts of management, to reach them etc.
I think this story makes sense as an illustration of how not to hire people.
You and large amount of very technical people in this thread are the exact types of people that Google would, more than likely, try to avoid for a position like this.
Nobody's calling the recruiter dumb. Everybody is calling the process dumb. A process that puts somebody that cannot answer these questions, in charge of asking them and evaluating the answers.
Having the candidate evaluate the competence of their recruiter is not part of the interview process. What the hell.
It is unfortunate, but as mentioned above, you need to just play the game until you get to the real part. It's like when I call customer support, I gotta play along with the non-technical people and get them to bump me up the chain to someone technical when I need advanced help.
The unfortunate truth is that it's unreasonable to dedicate precious engineer time to screen millions and millions of people, they'd get no actual work done. So the first layers has to be like this. You just play along for the first step, and after that it'll get much much more interesting, trust me.
This guy seemed like the kind of person who loves showing off his knowledge and having the last word on everything. Honestly this kind of people, as knowledgeable as they are, usually do poorly in a work environment.
You say "Everyone is making the assumption that the author of the post transcribed this interview instead of paraphrasing it". As a member of "everyone", I disagree.
I do suspect it's not as black and white as the article makes it out to be but the general attitude is not uncommon in tech companies. It's in fact so common it has become a bit of a meme. So I'm personally taking the article with that in mind.
> This was a culture interview, not a technical interview
Oh spare me. If a "Director of Engineering at Google", above in the thread, calls the interview "super strange" and "making [the recruiter] look like a blithering idiot", you can't start making random excuses up for Google. "It's about the culture!"
Also, as a member of "everyone", how can you disagree with that statement when no one has even bothered to call out the fact that we only have one side of the story and it's the side of the story that wants our sympathies?
EDIT: I found the post you were referring to (it wasn't at the top when I first posted my responses)... The "Director of Engineering" was even saying that he doesn't buy the transcript because it's only one side of the story. That pretty much seals my point.
Also, you're moving the goalposts here. At the time this was posted, the author of the post claimed it was an interview for Director, people were claiming that the interviewer acted exactly as written, and I, along with others, were claiming that either the author left out information, misunderstood it, or edited it.
Just to clarify, at least for the SRE hiring process, you first have a single technical phone screening with a technical recruiter (not an engineer) which is literally on the phone. At least it was for me, no webcam or anything. It's a pretty short and back-to-back question/answer type of conversation similar to what is told by the article (although the article strikes me as odd and does not match my experience). After that you have a couple (or more if need) of "phone" (read: hangouts with webcam and shared doc) interviews with actual engineers and those are more technical and require you to write code as well. Then you'll be moved to on-site interviews.
(This is for Europe at least, I imagine it'd be similar in other areas but can't know 100%).
Most technical people, surprisingly, don't have the tact to discern these two scenarios.
Not sure where you're getting this "be a dick" routine thing from, but when I read through the transcript, it was clear that the recruiter was looking for an excuse to reject the author, and nothing else.
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.
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...
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. :)
I want to follow up on this and see what the deal is. It just strikes me as fundamentally wrong.
I'm honestly hoping this is not actually a Google recruiter doing this; if it is, that's just broken.
Maybe it was for a vendor/contractor position.
Employees on an H1-B visa have drastically less job mobility than US Citizens. This creates a power advantage for the employer.
>but this is Google
Google has, in the past, illegally conspired to prevent other companies from recruiting their employees. This lowers wages and reduces employee mobility. Clearly there's incentive because they have literally broken the law in the past to achieve these results.
Yet Google pays the lawyers needed to get you a Green Card as fast as possible.
Some people responded saying that they might still do this to get underpaid employees from abroad... which is just silly. The salaries are exactly the same whatever your country of origin, and companies like Google are not the ones you should attack if you want to make a point about H-1B abuse.
Also, judging by the smugness of the people I interviewed, the "We'll stop here because it's obvious you don't have the skills..." part doesn't surprise me either.
As I understand it, this is meant to be a shibboleth a non-technical recruiter can use to spot an experienced software engineer / sysadmin in a quick conversation ("pre-screen"). That's a hard thing to pull off. They can't ask someone to design a system, diagnose a problem, or write code because they're unqualified to grade the answer. Instead, they ask some simple canned questions. The questions may not test essential, first principles sorts of knowledge, but if someone can't answer any of them it's a bad sign. The questions should have a small family of correct answers that recruiters can recognize, and the recruiter should just see that a candidate can get some of them right before scheduling a phone screen with a Google engineer. If the transcript is accurate, this process failed.
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.
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.
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!"
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).
EDIT: To add to this, I've seen this tactic before on an interview. Interviewer asked me a pretty softball technical question, I nailed it, and then he said, "No, you're wrong, it's [OBVIOUSLY INCORRECT ANSWER]." He was clearly trying to gauge how well I handle someone who thinks they know what they are talking about, but actually do not--which can a surprisingly large number of people in the office.
Recruiters do reject candidates and create false negative situations when it comes to positions that have a lot of candidates and very few openings. For Google, that would be every position, especially engineering.
Perhaps, but if the story is true, then it's wishful thinking to assume Google tried to do just that by putting a moron or someone acting like one in the recruiter chair. That way you risk hiring a quick talker who can talk, joke or laugh his/her way out of a wrong answer. If technical skills don't really matter, it's fine though.
Know your audience.
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.
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.
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 and 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), but I consider that a distinct use of the term.
Could something like Hamming distance be called a hash function too? It's not mentioned on its Wikipedia page.
But this is also the goal of non-crypto hash function like those used in a data structure no? Basically mapping a large space of inputs to a smaller space of outputs.
I would say the cryptographic hash is one the that has "desirable" security properties, things like not being able to recover the original input message using the hash, a tiny change in the input causes a substantial change in the output, or that its very unlikely that two inputs will produce a collision.
What matters is whether similar inputs get mapped to the same output. For the case where you want to minimize the probability that two inputs which are highly similar land in the same bucket, you want a crypto hash, although those are expensive so you want a cheaper approximation, which is exactly what fingerprint hashes do. The problem is that as the input values counts approach sqrt(output value size), you're going to start getting collisions, and ideally, you want those collisions to be evenly spaced.
In the case of a similarity hash function, you want the opposite, the closer things are in some metric space, the more likely they end in up in the same bucket.
That's what I was trying to say:
"a tiny change in the input causes a substantial change in the output."
But I probably didn't articulate that very well. I think we are saying the same thing.
You mentioned:
"The problem is that as the input values counts approach sqrt(output value size), you're going to start getting collisions"
Can you elaborate on the significant a square root here? Does this relate to the load factor?
level 1: foo, bar, baz level 2: frobnitz, barfoo level 3: 42, etc
In someone is using words from level 2 that work together in the ways laid out, they're probably beyond level 1, and wouldn't use the word 'fingerprint' (in this case) - they're giving more detail (and probably better) than what was being listened for.
first thing I do is try to get them to ask it a different way. then I play spew out every related buzzword possible as if its a question. Are you talking about .... oh, you mean .... I can usually get it in a few tries.
A hashing function is actually a sorting function. It's supposed to take an input space and sort it in an unpredictable and evenly distributed way across the output space. What's more, neighboring points in the input space, no matter the sort used to determine proximity should not result in neighboring points in the output space.
Fingerprinting is just an emergent value that comes from choosing fixed length hashes, and the fact that the mapping from input to output is stable.
So he asked "how did you figure this out so fast?". I told him I didn't, I just remember all the "important" powers of 2. He said "well... that's not what I was looking for, I wanted you to calculate it, but... I guess a candidate who memorizes powers of 2 is a positive sign?". I passed.
Oh well.
I cannot obviously tell you the exact specifics because of the NDA.
Maybe I dodged a bullet there and Amazon would have been a bad place to end up anyway.
I had the same a couple of years ago, at the time I was a Rails developer at a small startup. The first screening they asked me some basic technical questions (I guess it was a recruiter), then the second screening they asked me to walk through some data structures and algorithms off the top of my head.
I knew they would do this, and hadn't looked at any CS algorithms since university, so got a copy of Programming Pearls and studied through that every evening for the week before. I picked a few that I hoped would come up, and it turned out that's what they asked for. I think first a linked list (maybe doubly linked?) and then a tree sort.
I surprisingly passed, but the attitude of the interviewer really put me off. He said he knew Python, Java and Go - none of which I had used - and wasn't too happy when I said I wanted to use Ruby (which the first guy I spoke to, said was fine). Then throughout the interview it seemed very much like he was fighting against me and trying to prove me wrong.
After that I couldn't be bothered any more, I didn't really want a job at Google, it's just a recruiter contacted me and I decided to try it out. I guess this style of interviewing must work for Google, but it's just not the way I like a company to introduce itself to me. It just seems like they are approaching it with so much ego, as if I would be privileged to work there, but to me a job should be mutually beneficial.
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.
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.
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-ligh...
But yes, in practice, YMMV.
I've has similar issues with other companies. Network developer? Great! Let's ask some assembly / Java questions!
Uh... if you people are that stupid, I don't want to work for you. Thanks. <click>
> They asked me the same questions back in 2012. I was applying for a Java developer position.
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).
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!
Well much like most things in life, there is no such thing as concrete answer.
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-a4fa4...
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?
In terms of algorithmic time complexity, it is O(1)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hash_table#Collision_resolutio...
Edit: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:rPrtrh1...
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.
(I don't doubt this happened, but we're only hearing one side of the story)
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).
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.
Do you think a of particular question that you believe is different in the way Google asks it and the transcript of the OP?
* 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.
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.
If I may ask, what put you off your former field so that you decided to move to the server-side world?
(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).
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4113514
(funny thing the site is down, maybe given the traffic brought by HN, and I assume the web server hosting the blog is GWAN :-) )
> 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.
Almost feels like the recruiter was conspiring against you, but why?
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.
multiply 10,000 by 16. There are 160,000 bits
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!
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You find yourself in violent insistence that the world is the way you wish it was, rather than the way it actually is.
Any company who maintains that their interviewers are always right is telegraphing that they treat their workforce as mindless cogs in a machine.
Every time I encounter a candidate who thinks differently than I do, I treat him or her as a potential source of inspiration. Occasionally I learn something, and occasionally they do.
If the call actually went like this, it seems like you just hit a new/not very good recruiter.
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.
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)
[1] http://uk.businessinsider.com/why-nigerian-scam-emails-are-o...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 :-)
* 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.
I get the feeling this: http://bigocheatsheet.com would come in handy
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.
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.
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
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)
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.
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.
-----------------------------------------
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.
(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 :)
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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".
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.
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.
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
> I started coding 37 years ago (I was 11 years old)
they wrote him off right there
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%20st...
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!!
(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)
This is also called "cultural fit".
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.
Besides the bigger red flag that it was Palantir, you mean.
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.
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.
Maybe these types of interview practices are designed to reduce the applicant pool by scaring people away from even applying.
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?
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?
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)
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?
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.
Though I'm surprised this happened for a Google interview. Their recruitment workflow should now have allowed this to occur.
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.
Not saying they are not important, but you could have asked the same questions 20 years ago.
https://gist.github.com/monocasa/1d44a03cbd0170bfffc6a4a5c37...
You can do it with 4 shifts, 3 adds, 1 MUL and 4 ANDs.
Your code is simply suboptimal.
Your statement is rather vague in time, but for example Stockfish did certainly use the hardware intrinsic at some point. Some of the top closed source engines were using SWAR approaches mixed with loops (when the expected population is 0).
The answer is very dependent on the exact HW architecture and the cache pressure in the surrounding algorithms.
I 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, 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
The Kerningham way code seems faster for very sparse arrays (i.e. only one bit set per uint16), but slower otherwise.
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.
What does this even mean?
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.
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.
Yes, it is, but is it such a common knowledge?
It caches both instructions and data.
You can see read cached version here, http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:53TICuY...
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.
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.
Am I stupid, or is that a hard to answer question?
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.
Me: 4
Recruiter: Wrong. 2 + 2 = 5 for very large values of 2.There are bunch of those non competent recruiters playing smart asses...
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.
spat-e-all. spat-e-all. \o/
Based what the interview goes, Google might be on the "down" path too.
Google uses C++. Do they use malloc/free?
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.
Can you explain what a SWAR approach is?
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
ctrl-f for "down" next time :P
The site has been flaky, if not down, for hours now.
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.
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]
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.
I still think it's a bad practice, though. If you absolutely insist on doing so, multiple choice is the right way to go.
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.
We tried very hard to tailor our questions such that the candidate — if they new the answer — would only give one exact answer. Ours included a download of sample data to operate on; one was a question along the lines of "count the number of lines in any .h files that contain the following pattern <human description of the patter>"; the answer ends up being a single integer.
My experience has been — overwhelmingly — that recruiters hiring for technical positions are incredibly non-technical. This wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing, except for, as mentioned, the huge amount of winnowing required to just find candidate that are suitable to advance to a phone screen with an engineer.
> There are a LOT of people out there who grossly inflate their competency.
Exactly this.
I interview with Google every couple of years for fun; I always learn a lot and have a lot of fun with the on-site interviews.
The recruiter does indeed ask these kinds of questions. I've been asked most of the ones mentioned here, some of the multiple times.
I find it extremely hard to believe that the answers the recruiter had in front of them was wrong.
So to be clear, how it has worked every time I've done the dance with Google is:
1. An initial, non-technical recruiter chat.
2. The recruiter gives me a series of technical questions with extremely clear-cut answers, as described in the article.
3. A phone screen with someone technical.
4. A second technical phone screen.
5. On-site, 5-6 50 minute interviews.
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.
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.
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.
Hope this obviously talented person finds more meaningful employment elsewhere.
Well, he was interviewing _for_ google. Maybe they wrote up the test before google was online and forgot to update it.
Not only because of that interview, but the questions transforms into - who else have we missed from the great guys ...
(assuming the interview really went down this way. Which I have a hard time believing)
This is a pretty standard google first interview. Nothing out of the ordinary.
The recruiter will not suffer for following standard proceeding.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Raising the possibility of the accusation and defining the basis for raising the accusation are, for almost all intents and purposes, exactly the same as simple raising the accusation, especially in an internet forum, where nuance, body language, and tone are absent.
Thus, you really didn't avoid actually disparaging or discrediting this person there - instead, you attempted it via an obtuse use of a 'sneaky' method, and you bear deserved downvotes for doing so. If that was not your intent, you may look on this experience as a bug - the language you used did not communicate your intent to your discussion partners. It's almost always valuable to gain a deeper understanding of the functions you're using, though, whether they're from English or C++! Have a great day, and talk to you some other time! :)
So? If the criticism is invalid, then it's inoffensive. If it's valid, it's deserved.
Invalid criticism posted on the Internet or spoken out loudly might very well negatively affect someones life even if they don't personally care.
(Then multiply whatever result you get from that by the propensity of the internet to hear an accusation and judge it to be true WITHOUT actually researching it/'putting it on trial', so to speak, and post your answer here, I'm sure it will make for fascinating reading! ;) )
Maybe the datacenter burned to the ground. I don't know everything so I'm not going to conclude what's happened, just that I find it odd it's been hard down for several hours now. It's interesting, and it's oddly characteristic of this community to infer that I have malicious intent simply for observing something and finding it interesting.
There are many unkind interpretations of the blog post and I felt I did a pretty good job with restraint in the section even before the additional addendum. I didn't have a lot of sympathy. I didn't accuse the author of lying, or making shit up, or any sort of malicious behavior even before the evil addendum that everybody hates (and many, many non-gray comments nearby have done just that). Why would I suddenly change gears and attempt to destroy a reputation?
I am aware people are inundated with rhetoric like this in several forms of media due to the current political climate and other factors, but Jesus, people really need to put their knives away and start challenging their assumptions of the worst in people or we are all royally fucked. That's letting the rhetorical climate win. Occam: I'm a shady person not-so-subtly and rather hamfistedly deploying rhetorical tactics to destroy someone's reputation simply for blogging about the Google interview process, or I'm just a random dude typing things as I find them interesting. Your pick.
And that is the baseline Occam on the internet: the simplest explanation with the fewest assumptions is that the person on the other end is a troll who is destroying someone or something because destroying things is fun. Nobody needs any reason, on the internet, to want someone to go down in flames. Seriously, I have to make many more assumptions to assume good faith on your part than otherwise - the only reason I would bother applying another heuristic, that is, not to attribute to malice that which can be explained by incompetence, would be because it isn't worth the skin I'll lose off my typing fingers to engage you. You seem interesting and worth engaging, which I why I'd tell you things like, "raising an accusation is functionally similar to making the accusation."
Please don't take any more HN threads into tangents of drama. I know it's annoying to be accused of something you don't feel you did, but this subthread is the kind of noise we all need to avoid here.
Everything documented about their hiring practices and anecdotal evidence from people gone through their interview process is that you talk with a real engineer and write code for your interview.
I 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.
Several other people have come out and said the same.