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Comment by geofft | Hacker News Reader

This was posted previously, in October 2016:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12701272

An actual Google director of engineering pointed out that these are individual-contributor SWE/SRE questions (and I can attest I got very similar questions as a new college grad).

As I commented previously: "Reading more closely, it sounds like they are not interviewing him for a director of engineering position; it just sounds like he thinks his current role, CEO-who-writes-code of a very small software company (http://www.gwan.com/about), qualifies him for a director-of-engineering-level position. He's probably being interviewed for an SRE team lead or thereabouts."

Also, a ton of this conversation makes a lot more sense if you make the assumption that the interviewee is misremembering the questions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12702726 (Which is a very gentle assumption, if the interviewee also mistakenly thought they were being interviewed to be a director of engineering.)

In which case, screening out someone with an inflated sense of their own experience and overconfidence that the stupid person on the other end of the phone is stupid is exactly what this process is supposed to do.

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> He's probably being interviewed for an SRE team lead or thereabouts

OK, but incorrect/inflexible quizzing about tech questions is inappropriate full stop. If this was an interview for SWE summer intern it'd be a badly-run interview.

> exactly what this process is supposed to do

You can't ensure that there will be no hurt feelings ever, but ideally the candidates you fail don't go around talking about how poor your interview process is.

> make the assumption that the interviewee is misremembering the questions

In your post you imagine slight differences that might make the questions more reasonable. I think the main problem here is the responses to the answers. For a non-engineer quizzing someone, the response to an answer should be "OK" and then you note down the answer and show your notes to an engineer at the end. This solves both the "that's not what's written on my sheet" problem and also allows the interviewee to form a more nuanced impression of your recruiting process.

> The response to an answer should be "OK" and then you note down the answer and show your notes to an engineer at the end.

This kinds of defeat the purpose of the screening interview though doesn't it? The point is to not disturb an engineer when 99% of the people that are being screened are unqualified.

If your engineering managers can't be disturbed than maybe you don't have time to hire.

To be fair we are talking about Google, not the local shop at the corner of the streets. Each recruiter must do tens of screening a day, and they have tens of recruiters assigned to each department, we are not talking about reviewing 2 applications a day during coffee break.

Not entirely: the answers written down by the recuiters can be reviewed in batch, while the phone screen has a lot more overhead.

> incorrect/inflexible quizzing about tech questions is inappropriate full stop

I don't disagree with this, but (to the best of my memory - this was in 2011), when this initial phone screen was presented to me, it was presented with some amount of "We want to figure out what you're good at so we're having the right people interview you for the right roles." Which is to say, I suspect that him failing out halfway through this screen was because of combativeness / personality, not phone screen performance per se.

> You can't ensure that there will be no hurt feelings ever, but ideally the candidates you fail don't go around talking about how poor your interview process is.

I think I disagree with this though - there are certain people who are going to be predisposed to complaining about things that don't go their way, and you want to make sure you fail them as early as possible. At a company small enough that its strength is the CEO's coding abilities, a curmudgeon with significant raw technical talent can do very well. At a Google-sized company they just can't.

The OP is misremembering (slightly) some questions.

Also, this quiz is given by non-technical recruiters just to get a guage on how tech-savvy the candidate is. If I remember correctly, the passmark is 6/10.

The questions (when not misremembered) are very precise in their wording, and recruiters are given a pretty comprehensive list of correct answers.

I'm sure a few great candidates fail this stage, but that's the nature of hiring. Google gets a lot of job applications per day, and a first stage screening like this needs to be able to be executed by non-technical staff in a few minutes. Other companies use online tests, which tend to take the candidate more time and are easier to cheat at.

They can, actually...the culture needs to learn to adopt them is all.

Having real talent and having to basically navigate terrain of those with less skill than you and yet, oddly enough, more power, is very frustrating. These people can knock orders of magnitude off development cycles, and make subtle decisions that affect your product years in to the future.

If anyone feels even remotely insecure because of your prowess you are shot down. I was pushed out of Microsoft just for accomplishing a task that was supposed to be impossible "because a senior engineer said so." In other words, I did my job (I wasn't aware it was supposedly impossible) and then a management chain became incredibly uncomfortable and dumped me.

You might say I'm the problem...I point to the stack of clowns that said it couldn't be done and go...yeah sure.

> These people can knock orders of magnitude off development cycles, and make subtle decisions that affect your product years in to the future.

These people can also introduce orders of magnitude into development cycles, and make subtle decisions that affect the product in negative ways years into the future. I seem to have made a career out of cleaning up after these people, and I have no sympathy for them. An amazing research project or tech demo isn't an amazing sustainable project.

> I was pushed out of Microsoft just for accomplishing a task that was supposed to be impossible "because a senior engineer said so." In other words, I did my job (I wasn't aware it was supposedly impossible) and then a management chain became incredibly uncomfortable and dumped me.

When I've seen this, it's usually because the task can be done 90% in a straightforward way but 100% is impossible, and the person doing the task thinks that doing it 90% counts, possibly because they're unaware of how important the the remaining 10% is, and no amount of explanation will convince them they're seeing the problem wrong. Then they should be let go, not because they did the task, but because they're unable to understand requirements and wasting both the time of others and their own time.

... all that said, there's a very good place for this type of person: small businesses. That seems to be where the author of this article is, right now. He's got some weird ideas about how computers work, that are probably not right, but maybe they are right and he's a genius and we're all years behind him. He's built a product around those ideas. If he can sell the product, more power to him. If he can't, and the product is meeting 90% but not 100% of his customers' requirements, they just don't buy and go to a competitor. No awkward conversations about firing, no wasted time trying to get their existing hire to perform instead of hiring people who can do the job, etc. And the burden of getting him to learn how to understand requirements is entirely on him and not on anyone else.

I don't think there was any problem with the applicants attitude, but plenty wrong with the screener's attitude. As in, I wouldn't want to work for an arrogant prat like that.

Then the interview process did what it was supposed to do. I wouldn't want to work with anyone who would call the screener an arrogant prat.

> OK, but incorrect/inflexible quizzing about tech questions is inappropriate full stop. If this was an interview for SWE summer intern it'd be a badly-run interview.

I would not ask the questions listed in this interview. But, I'm not a recruiter. I think it's safe to say that the average recruiter has a better understanding of their objectives and constraints than I do, and is better able to judge what types of questions to ask during an initial screen than I am. Those questions may not be optimize for the same thing any given candidate is optimizing for.

> You can't ensure that there will be no hurt feelings ever, but ideally the candidates you fail don't go around talking about how poor your interview process is.

People in the original thread in 2016 said much the same, arguing that people would no longer want to work for Google. It's 2018 and Google is still not having any trouble attracting engineering talent. Seems like offering high salaries and interesting work matters a lot more to the average candidate than whether the prescreen has a view suboptimal questions.

"Google is still not having any trouble attracting engineering talent."

Is this really true, though? Are they losing out on more top end candidates?

There are other places with interesting work and big paychecks. Some of them aren't building reputations for annoying interview processes.

An average IC5 eng at Google makes $350k all in. An IC6 eng goes to around $500k. You dont get those types of salaries elsewhere easily. This is especially important if you have a family in the bay area given the expenses.

Liking money doesn't map to "best."

It doesn't. That said, in companies like Google, an eng has a lot of flexibility to choose the team they want to work on - so eventually many people find the thing which they really like. And good money on top of it is the icing on the cake.

Also, I linked money since the parent comment talked about finding interesting ans similar paying role as Google's.

But is that true? I thought one interviewed for a generic slot at Google, with actual team placement being done after hiring to fill the slot.

Once you're in, you can likely shop around after X amount of time. That's how it works at my non-Google tech company

Correct, but you can accept/decline the offer based on team placement. You don't have to accept and then see what your options are.

(For complicated reasons I actually spent about May through July of last summer with an offer open, and talked to 5 or 6 different teams through that process... and at the end of the process when I called to decline, I was told that headcount had shifted for Q3, the team I'd most recently spoken to had lost their open headcount, but there were other teams that had now had open headcount and might be interested in talking.)

> You dont get those types of salaries elsewhere easily.

Except for all of the other big tech companies?

> Except for all of the other big tech companies?

Many of which have the same type of interview processes?

Hell, Facebook sometimes asks two coding questions per interview round, which is 45 minutes long as I recall. They seem to expect perfectly compiling code.

If you're not doing coding competitions or practicing on Leetcode or other sites of its ilk, where you learn to regurgitate a Knapsack problem solution or Russian nesting doll problem in ~15 minutes, you're going to have a hard time getting into many of the big tech companies unless you went to a university that teaches using this style.

I've seen the sort of problem that required dynamic programing combined with a binary search for the algorithmically optimal solution in a phone screen!

I lucked into an easier interview loop, crushed it, and got hired and performed well at one of these types of big companies.

But I dread jumping ships because of this daunting interview hoop we jump through.

I've already tried to leave and got smacked around in the two interviews I went through because of nerves. I knew the problems, I knew how to solve them, but for some reason I just didn't perform well and couldn't really cross the finish line.

I do lots of interviews of smart, well spoken people who seem to be able to decompose problems, enumerate pros and cons of various solutions and then struggle with a filter and a reduction over the lines in a file.

These people are un-prepared for the interview, this question is easy and not insulting. Anyone doing tech interviews of any sort should be able to answer it, yet most don't.

I suggest two things, 1) start doing competitive coding exercises, there are lots of problem sets available, search for "online judge" [0] and 2) practice interviewing under real conditions, use pramp [1].

Being able to ace a top-k company interview is an ego boost that reduces stress levels day to day.

[0] http://www.spoj.com/problems/classical/

[1] https://www.pramp.com/#/

> I suggest two things, 1) start doing competitive coding exercises, there are lots of problem sets available, search for "online judge" [0] and 2) practice interviewing under real conditions, use pramp [1].

Leetcode, SPOJ, and others are how I landed my current job. What was most helpful for me was actually going back and reimplementing all of the fundamental datastructures and algorithms. E.g. binary search tree, skip lists, BFS, DFS, different sorting algorithms, etc. From then, it was also helpful to remember where these were being used in the real systems I interact with.

Solving the interview problems is typically not my problem. In every round of my Google and Facebook interviews, I knew the optimal solution--confirmed by looking up the solutions after the interview. However, I happened to choke under the interview pressure and turned into a fool. Test anxiety--interview anxiety in this case--is a real thing.

What I am going to do in the next round of interviews is apply for dozens of companies I just don't care about, fail a bunch of interviews to get used to the pressure again, and then re-apply to the companies I actually care about.

Pramp is a community driven service to simulate live interviews as closely as possible, exactly for that reason.

An annoying interview process is a one-time pain, though. Once you're in it's behind you. (For my current employer - not Google - I did a 3-hour auto-graded coding test in which I resorted to rewriting something in C and not calling free() to make it fast enough to pass all the test cases, which I hated, but it was a one-time thing and the company itself is otherwise pretty reasonable. I should probably have held it against the company, but I didn't.)

If Google is losing out on good candidates, it's going to be either because of false negatives in the interview process, or ongoing engineering culture concerns (which is roughly why I declined the Google offer I got last year), not because of people self-selecting against annoying interviewing processes. Even this blog post itself is written in the form of "Here's what you need to know to get past the process" - i.e., even this guy assumes people still want to work at Google and work around their process.

You forgot one more thing, google is loosing enginers due to it creepy nature. I was invited to interviews on multiple occasions but they are one of the last companies I would work for. I don't care about money, wherever I was working, I had it more than enough to have a really good life and a thousand $ up or down doesnt make much of a difference. But working for a company that actually engages into global spying of people is like a mental prostitution. Not I only wouldn't work for them but also wouldn't take anyone working for them in past working for me. I value people opinion about their impact to the world and google guys went way off into wrong direction. They are simply emitting the signal "I would do anything for money" and this attitude can be understood for someone working in McDonalds, but for a hi-tech worker that can get job anywhere, this is just unacceptable. It shows moral rottening (or just beeing "simpleminded") and... well sorry, there is more than enough other people I will be far more happy to work with. I am really sorry that people like Rob Pike and Ken Thompson, which I highly respect, work for them. As developers (Not Google, not Facebook, not Apple, not Microsoft! The Developers! Without them, they aren't worth a dime!) we are at the moment rulling the world, we have to accept some moral obligations instead of just beeing slaves to making money for others stock options.

(How cool, I get multiple downvotes which means that the average non-important people (I could use stronger words, but you do know where you fit) don't agree, which makes me flattered. Thank you.)

(The other guys upvoting me, thank you, you are somehow restoring my faith, that not everyone is a zealot)

I can understand this sentiment.

To me, it feels like the Facebooks and Googles of the industry (by which I encompass other ad tech firms) are the 'banks' of 10 years ago. A few years ago, and I bet still today, there were/are a lot of new grads and experienced techies saying openly that they'd not want to work for a bank. Hopefully a similar spurning happens here.

Which is very ironic considering banks were the biggest tech employers at that time and some had pretty good money and working conditions as well.

How is that ironic...

Yeah, I lumped that under "engineering culture," but AMP in particular and the nonchalance about centralizing everything on Google servers—and the fact that I knew AMP's PM would be rewarded for the project's success and not questioned on long-term good of the world in his promo meeting—was a concrete reason I wasn't excited about the job. I didn't want to be subject to the same incentives.

"google is loosing enginers due to it creepy nature"

Have a source for that?

Just duckduckgo it.

You a G! My sentiments exactly. We are at a critical point in our world where we are the "magicians" and just chasing a paycheck isn't good enough. Interesting work isn't good enough. Making a positive impact on the world is the bare minimum....

I know multiple people who have told Google recruiters that they are not interested on the basis of their famously drawn out and disrespectful interviewing.

Of course, Google is one of the top names in tech and has already employed some luminaries many developers would love to work with, so I'm sure that they get some leaway to treat their interviewees poorly, but for people with other good options, there's not a lot of appeal to being sucked into one end of a very long, very painful funnel.

Having said that, Lazlo Bock has some interesting things to say about hiring in an organisation like Google.

Yes, Google is missing out on some top-end candidates, who probably wouldn’t be happy there anyway. It’s not so simple as having a less annoying interview process and getting better engineers. The interview process is an extension of the corporate culture. It embodies certain attitudes and probably attracts certain personalities and repels others. Lots of people want to work at Google, and lots of people do, so only Google knows if something about the process is not working for them.

I’ve worked at Google, and engaged with Google recruiters over the years (who didn’t even know I was an ex-Googler). Talking to their recruiters does feel like talking to chatbots and can feel quite dehumanizing, in big and small ways. I’ve also worked at small start-ups that did world-class recruiting, or at least several classes better than Google — perhaps there are even higher classes, who knows. Both activities are called “recruiting” but they barely seem like the same thing.

> I think it's safe to say that the average recruiter has a better understanding of their objectives and constraints than I do, and is better able to judge what types of questions to ask during an initial screen than I am.

That's an odd assumption to make, that the average recruiter is competent, for a community that assumes the vast majority of their fellow engineers can't code.

> a community that assumes the vast majority of their fellow engineers can't code.

If you're talking about FizzBuzz, that's about candidates, not stably employed folks. Candidates are by definition a pool that favors people that haven't been hired already, except for people new to the industry. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2005/01/27/news-58/

(Also, there's no rigorous evidence supporting the hypothesis that most people in the industry or even most applicants can't write FizzBuzz, as far as I know. But that's not quite relevant to your question about perception; I do admit there is a perception that the hypothesis is true.)

Only people who took specific classes in a university write FizzBuzz.

I never assume the recruiter understands the objectives of a job. All they have to go on is a list of job requirements written as a wish list by the hiring manager, they are seldom technical, and are usually less competent than you average engineer, especially about technical matters.

Good technical recruiters are rare, and seldom work for big companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon, Cisco, (Yahoo), IBM, etc. Most of them read questions from a script, and then believe that the map is the territory.

Assuming he didnt lie about the exchange of words, this guy could be a homeless person make believing hes getting hired as ceo of google and this interview would still be an affront to proper advancement. You cannot possibly justify making a quiz that asks about kill in unix and doesnt accept SIGKILL ~literally kill with SIGTERM the default. If you are looking for the default level (15) you should specify. If this interview actually happened the way this guy says it did, Google is making terrible mistakes. I know first semester 2 year networking degree students that would have scored higher than this guy. Seriously people should be appalled at the inadequacy of that interview. Respect lost.

I had a phone screen recently, and got asked some of the questions on this post. However, rather than that sigterm question, I got "What signal does the linux kill command emit by default?", (with the answer obviously being sigterm (I totally blanked out and got it wrong though :P)).

Anyway, I strongly suspect they're just misremembering that question.

> Assuming he didnt lie about the exchange of words

If it's not clear: I strongly believe he lied. (I don't think he intentionally lied, as in deliberately twisted what the interviewer said to make them look bad: I think he genuinely misheard the questions because understanding questions accurately when asked by someone he considers inferior is not his strength, and then incorrectly reported them, which is still lying.)

There are lots of people on the internet (including in the prior thread, including my own memory in the prior thread which I have now completely forgotten) who have reported that the kill question is about default kill command signal and not SIGKILL. It's certainly theoretically possible that the interviewer mis-spoke, but it's very hard to make that sort of mistake if you don't understand the questions you're asking (which is what he's alleging) because you wouldn't know enough to coherently phrase that version of the question.

He definitely didn't lie as I got my correct answers also rejected by some HR guy with no technical background at all. Almost the same questions btw.

I've conversed with you before on this website - you are also someone who does not understand technical terms used by other people, and should fail at this stage.

It sucks, but the purpose of an interview process is not to accept everyone, and the fact that certain people (even certain technically skilled people) are rejected is not an indication by itself that the process is broken.

You are saying that when enough people repeat wrong facts it will become true. It certainly happens, but it's still wrong. Many people believe they can turn lead into gold. Just repeat it all over.

>Also, a ton of this conversation makes a lot more sense if you make the assumption that the interviewee is misremembering the questions

But (per [1]) then what would be the charitable mis-remembering of the recruiter saying "that's not the answer I have on my sheet of paper." If it were someone technically competent, that would never be the response; it would be a technical explanation of the error. The most likely scenario is that a non-technical person is being expected to gauge technical answers.

Incidentally, someone on that thread [2] suggested making a meme of that, where the interviewer regards an answer as wrong, despite being very good, because it's "not what they have".

Example from my experience:

Interviewer: "What would be the run time if you did it this way [explanation]."

Me: "Oh, wow, that's a pretty clever approach! In that case, it wouldn't even depend on the input size. Then it would only be limited by IO."

Interviewer: "Wrong. It's constant."

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16932260

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12701625

It's not the derivative of distance vs time that matters but the integral of acceleration.

> The most likely scenario is that a non-technical person is being expected to gauge technical answers.

I'm not disagreeing with this - this certainly appears to be the case.

But I think a qualified technical person should be able to understand the question that the non-technical person is asking and respond in a useful way. Although, yes, if they immediately respond with "Wrong, it's <keyword>", it's hard to do that. But I feel like a good interviewer (good is orthogonal to technical!) is likely to say "OK, so what is the runtime?", and "constant" and "O(1)" should both be on their list of keywords.

My charitable mis-remembering would be that the transcript here skipped these sorts of prompts, or that the interviewer was actually upset at the interviewee's demeanor/attitude already and wanted to cut the interview short by that point and was just trying to finish their block of questions. (Which I think is legitimate. As a technical interviewer, if you start condescending to me during the interview, I'm much less likely to give you the benefit of the doubt and help you along with Socratic hints.)

>But I feel like a good interviewer (good is orthogonal to technical!) is likely to say "OK, so what is the runtime?", and "constant" and "O(1)" should both be on their list of keywords.

In that case, he was the CTO, though, and should know that "constant" is the same as "does not depend on the input size". (Though I'll admit I could have been unclear by trying to pre-emptively show how I knew what the next binding constraint would be.)

Agree with your points otherwise, but I still think the protocol should be (even if you're skipping through), to say something more like "let me note that down and I'll pass on your response" rather than imply it's not wrong because it's not in your list.

"As a technical interviewer, if you start condescending to me during the interview, I'm much less likely to give you the benefit of the doubt and help you along with Socratic hints."

As a technical interviewee, if a screener acts like all they are there for is to prove that they are smarter than me and start condescending to me, I'm not going to give a damn about their questions because I wouldn't want to work with them.

When a technical question has more than one answer, (like binary, decimal or mnemonic values for changing file permissions), the screener has to know that, or they make fools out of themselves. The whole thing with "attributes" vs "metadata" was just stupid. (Technically the metadata is comprised of the attributes. So they are both correct.)

>Also, a ton of this conversation makes a lot more sense if you make the assumption that the interviewee is misremembering the questions. Which is a very gentle assumption.

No, that's a pretty insulting and disturbingly koolaid flavored presumption.

This conversation makes sense to me because of the number of people who have commented that they ended up being unwittingly considered for position that they did not apply for and did not actually even necessarily want. There's at least two in the comments section here and I know two more personally (one of whom is a very talented director of HR, ironically enough).

I actually even said this to that director of engineering's comment you mentioned two years ago.

He neglected to respond.

I admit that this is certainly possible (Google recruiters wildly underleveling people, at least relative to their expectations if not their actual qualifications, and not clarifying this before passing the candidate onto other recruiters).

If it's happening, it's a very different problem (no less real of a problem, though) and process fixes at this stage wouldn't help.

Also, this interview performance should have been enough to disqualify this candidate for the role he envisioned, too. If only because, if he was actually intending on applying to be a director of engineering, the right answer to question 3 is something like "I think there's been some sort of mistake."

It's not only possible it's likely if they are setting general hiring quotas for their recruiters.

And, they almost certainly are setting quotas because they're currently being sued by one of their own recruiters over their quota policy.

>Also, this interview performance should have been enough to disqualify this candidate

They neither qualify him nor disqualify him. Correctly or near correctly answered trivia questions tell you almost nothing about a candidate other than that they're probably a software engineer of some kind.

> They neither qualify him nor disqualify him. Correctly or near correctly answered trivia questions tell you almost nothing about a candidate other than that they're probably a software engineer of some kind.

Please read the entire sentence you quoted halfway - by "interview performance" I don't mean the correctness of the answers, I mean his a) expectation that UNIX trivia quizzes are a normal part of a director-level interview (and that it's not more likely that there was a miscommunication in scheduling) and b) attitude.

"Correctly or near correctly answered trivia questions tell you almost nothing about a candidate other than that they're probably a software engineer of some kind."

This. I hate trivia, and trivia questions. You can get a book or find a website to bone up on trivia questions if that's your thing. However, it says nothing about whether you actually know anything about working with computers every day.

Ha! I remember this from back then. Interview process aside, did you see the guy's technology page?

Which process has led to TrustLeap's technology? Instead of trying to add something on the top of a multi-layered construction done by many different persons in a period of time exceeding 30 years, TWD has resolved the problem from scratch in a few months.

riiiiight

From their linkedin?

> TrustLeap, the security division of TWD Industries AG (founded in 1998), protects digital assets with cryptanalytically unbreakable technology (safe against unlimited computing power as it is proven mathematically that no key leaks can be exploited).

Riiight.

it is actually possible. one time pad

Key leaks of a one-time pad can be exploited.

At some point an inflated sense of experience is necessary to succeed in starting your own company. You have to literally believe you are capable of having a real impact. Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, etc. All were told at one point "you don't have the necessary experience for that." Or "are you fucking crazy?" Or something meant to challenge their experience. The hard realization is that none of them had the experience...but boy did they sure earn it.

Point is: arrogance isn't the curse you might think it is.

There are a handful of sociopathic people who reach those heights, while most of the rest do not. Mistaking arrogance for an active ingredient in success is probably a mistake likely to lead you down a bad road. Ruthlessness, arrogance, greed might be things you need to be a high level founder, banker, CEO or politician, but most people with those traits are abject failures. You need to be smart, and very lucky as well, and even without arrogance smart and lucky should pay off.

Whereas I think the screener had an overinflated sense of both his knowledge, importance and the "rightness" of the answers that he expected. The questions were narrow, and the right/wrong on the answers was oversimplistic and more suited to a freshman computing college test, not the working world. The guy answered him with more nuance and detail, but he arrogantly told the guy to "learn more about...", when it's pretty obvious that the appicant knew more than the screener.

> In which case, screening out someone with an inflated sense of their own experience and overconfidence that the stupid person on the other end of the phone is stupid is exactly what this process is supposed to do.

This is obviously an excuse for how shitty the interviewer is. If you want to rule out people with a inflated sense of their own experience, the way you do that does NOT involve telling them they're wrong when they're obviously right ("that's not the answer I have on my sheet of paper").

Again, my claim is the interviewer did not say exactly that and this man with an inflated sense of his own qualifications is retelling the story in a way that's favorable to him.

All available evidence points to him either mishearing or mis-transcribing the question, which was actually "What is the signal sent by the kill command."

What evidence is there available that points to him mishearing?

As I and others have said a few times on this thread and on 2016's thread, there are a huge number of sources of people saying "I got the same question" and "The question was 'What is the signal sent by the kill command.'"

So there are two possibilities:

1. This particular interviewer actually said "What is the name of the KILL signal," despite other interviewers regularly saying the question correctly. The entire thesis of this article is that the interviewer does not understand UNIX and is reading pre-written questions from a piece of paper, so that's an extremely unlikely mistake for the interviewer to make.

2. He misheard the question.

and i just commented the same thing i did then, because i completely didn't notice this was from 2016 :)

Yeah, try discrediting the article than fix your mistakes.

Real mature, Google.

... Sorry, are you accusing me of working for Google? My identity is very public, I don't.

Then you're most likely trolling everyone, by commenting that you know more about their processes than most outsiders do.

So stop right there and run back into your PR cave.

I do. I've interviewed twice and gotten offers twice (and declined twice). That's what I said in my post. I'm claiming no greater (but no less) knowledge than having gone through the interview process.

Are you implying that because you went through a couple of good interviews with them, and because one director who works at Google said that they don't hire this way, it doesn't happen?

That's the worst logic ever.

I'm blaming Google for doing this, and you take it to imply that I said you work at Google? Maybe you didn't accept those offers from Google. It still doesn't mean those things didn't happen at Google - and it is extremely shameful that you resort to defending them.

Congratulations, what you have done is just free PR for Google. I'd rather listen to everyone else than you.

You crossed into personal attack in this subthread. We ban accounts that do that, so could you please (re-)read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and not do that again?

Not sure why this is so highly rated when it's so blatantly wrong. There are literally dozens of director-level interview samples online (as well as people discussing these on Quora and other platforms) and they all start with the recruiter screening process. To say that only SREs get screened is incredibly misleading.

Can you post a link to one of these? The first Quora answer I find says, "First interview was on the phone with a recruiter. The questions were typical recruiter screening. Nothing hard or detailed. Questions about background and feeling out my interest."

I definitely believe there's a recruiter screening process - I would just be surprised if it's the same screening process they give to new college grads, with the same slate of questions. (Even if you're going to give them technical questions, at least give them harder technical questions!) I obviously have no real information having not interviewed for a director-level position, I'm just stating that these questions seem like the same slate I got as a college grad.

I read a similar screen a few years ago (some guy with a math PhD, also applying for a director position at GOOG). I'll try to find the blog post. Even if the screens are different, I'm not sure they're that different.

"math PhD" as highest credential or achievement is plain or senior engineer, nowhere near director.

He was in fintech IIRC, I just remember he had a math PhD because I explored his blog a bit.

Any luck finding this? You claimed there are dozens of director-level interview samples online with questions similar to this story, and all you've posted is that one person on Glassdoor got one technical question that wasn't anything like the ones in this story.

That's not what was said. At all.

To be perfectly honest, I doubt there are dozens of director-level interview samples because there aren't tons of engineering directors, further "director of engineering" is a management, not technical role, so wouldn't be given questions like this, at all, and of the remainder, most of them were promoted from within google, not hired from outside it.

Most new hires get screened in some manner, but very few new hires are directors of engineering, so I'd mighty curious to see your source for the interview questions they got.

What these questions are are the standard set of pre-screening questions asked of a potential SRE IC or maybe TLM candidate. A SWE wouldn't be asked these questions, because they aren't related to the role. A SWE candidate still might get screened, but not with these questions.

> What these questions are are the standard set of pre-screening questions asked of a potential SRE IC or maybe TLM candidate. A SWE wouldn't be asked these questions, because they aren't related to the role. A SWE candidate still might get screened, but not with these questions.

A question on Glassdoor (for a Director position) is in the same vein: "How do you tell if a calculator is 8 bit or 16 bit."[1]

[1] https://www.glassdoor.com/Interview/Google-Director-Intervie...

a) 2013, when they still asked brainteasers

b) That's a different question from this set about UNIX arcana, so it's not the same set

c) All of the other questions on that page are non-technical, so this isn't a question from a standard director set either. (It may be what 'DannyBee said, that people assumed they were being screened for a much higher position than they were actually being screened for.)

> How do you tell if a calculator is 8 bit or 16 bit.

As someone who has reverse-engineered calculators, that question has me curious. You could implement the same external behavior regardless of what processor a calculator uses. So I can't see any way to determine the bit width. Is there an answer I'm missing? (Also the question ignores the many 4-bit calculators.)

(Of course you could open up the chip and take a look with a microscope, which I've done. But I don't think that's the answer they are looking for.)

Can an 8 bit calculator display/operate on numbers bigger than 2^8?

Yes, by operating on multiple bytes

In the same way you can have bigints in a 64bit system...

Can you link me some?

I suspect, again, it's more people thinking they are being interviewed for director, when they aren't (or it was long enough ago that it was before leadership recruiting existed)

Doesn’t sound like the interviewee has an inflated sense of worth from what’s written and it sounds like the interviewer cheated off someone to get his degree

What did I fart or something

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