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Comment by trisimix | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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