Coder of 37 years fails Google interview because he doesn't match answer sheet | Hacker News Reader

Coder of 37 years fails Google interview because he doesn't match answer sheet

gwan.com

64 pointshuntermeyer22 comments

I've heard that list of questions before. They sound very old.

Some of the answers are out of date. It's been decades since "stat" actually returned the contents of the inode structure on disk. There are lots of different file systems now, with different internal data structures. "stat" gives you a standardized result regardless of what's physically stored. Does ZFS even have "inodes"?

TCP packets don't have "types". They have 9 bit flags. SYN, FIN, ACK, and RST are the important ones. There are others, PSH and URG (obsolete) and NS, CWR, and ECE (congestion notification that never really caught on). That field is not an enum.

Quicksort does not have the best "big O". There are pathological cases for Quicksort. There are binning algorithms that can beat O(n log n), going back to SyncSort from the 1960s.

Bit counting by table lookup went out years ago. If you make the table big enough to be useful, you cause cache misses. There's a population count instruction in CPUs with SSE4, which by now is almost all x86 machines in active use.

MAC addresses are traditionally 48 bits, but the IEEE is pushing EUI-64, which expands them to 64 bits. Traditionally they were 24 bits of vendor ID, 24 bits of serial number. Address space problems. They also were once fixed in the hardware, but now big shops change them dynamically to make cloud routing ("software defined networking") work.

Somebody has an answer sheet from about 2000.

Although this is just jaw-droppingly embarrassing for Google, it also highlights a wider industry problem.

Only technical staff are qualified to screen technical hires. Personnel Departments should really be the last link in the chain, not the first.

Personnel Departments shouldn't even the last step. They should be ones welcoming you aboard on your first day.

Disagree; there is such a thing as behavioral / fit, and I'd rather have someone neutral in there (not just the hiring manager), and that person should be staffed out of HR.

Seems to me the fit that matters is within your innermost team members. If you can't trust your teams to hire for themselves, you have other issues.

That's not how you build organizational culture, that's how you build fiefdoms of toxicity and exclusion.

Fit is way bigger than two pizzas.

1) What are the proper switch settings for the last disk drive in a chain?

2) What are the proper flyback time and front porch settings for a 60Hz 480/320 display?

3) What is the latency of fetches from your plated wire memory?

4) What resistor should be cut to change from a current-loop to voltage-loop TTY on a DEC controller board?

5) How do you specify a library as private on a JCL control card?

6) What is the TECO command to erase the last line?

7) What are the most common modem settings to communicate at 9600 baud?

8) What is the most likely failure mode of an IBM Series 1?

9) What is the front panel switch sequence for cold-booting a PDP-8?

10) How do you specify segment swaps in an overlay loader?

11) What patch panel plug configuration should your card sorter use to sort on column 4?

12) How can you dynamically change the output format statement in Fortran?

13) How do you modify a floppy to write on both sides?

14) What does an "imprecise interrupt" mean on an IBM Mainframe?

15) How do you find a failing instruction using the PSW?

16) How would you write a COBOL instruction to generate a hardware translate-and-test instruction?

17) What is the proper hole pattern in a paper tape to generate NOP?

18) Write a Register-to-Register move instruction for a PDP-11

19) What is the BASIC instruction to modify memory?

20) What is the seek sequence that will physically move a BASIC-4 disk drive cabinet?

(provide all answers in EBCDIC)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16932006

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

Google needs to overhaul its hiring practices if people who are not technically oriented are involved in the hiring process.

As a fellow software developer, this is pretty embarrassing that the interviewer wouldn't even pass an entry level course in college in any relevant degree program.

I can see why Google no longer innovates

> Why Quicksort is the best sorting method?

This must be some kind of joke. That's first-year student level of naivety here! (And I'm unfair to most students.) I remember learning about sorting functions, when I was a teen (in the 80s), and even in the book it was NOT written that it was the BEST method, and it was an entry-level book, for beginners.

> Recruiter: I have to check that you know the right answers.

Sums up the whole thing I think. It's impressive.

Why do they even need a HUMAN then? Just use an online test, it won't be worse.

> 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.

The level of arrogance and stupidity is stunning (especially after the previous questions/answers).

If this is exactly what happened, and not an exaggeration, it's incredibly embarrassing. If it had been me, I would not have hesitated to have a few strong words and would have put the interviewer to his/her place. Sheesh. That attitude of theirs is almost beyond belief.

I'm almost reluctant to believe that it really happened, especially in a big technical company (even if the recruiter is a third party). Unfortunately, after many years in the field and meeting a HUGE number of arrogant & clueless people with bad attitudes, I suspect it is probably true.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16932006

I've always been surprised that even intelligent recruiters don't seem to realize that one of the things that a good candidate will find most off-putting is a recruiter trying to have a technical conversation or asking technical questions.

To be fair though, I thought his answer about inodes was wrong. Seems to me the candidate was defining an inode number, not the inode itself.

Why does a recruiter conduct a technical interview ????? This a recipe for failure. Let a recruiter check for other non technical stuff. And let an engineer do the technical questions and the evaluation. Also, worst is to have prefab questions and answers.

Has this been circulating on Twiddit or Retter or someplace? There must be some reason why an older piece was submitted several times today.

It's on Reddit, was just about to submit it.

This is what happens when recruiters are asked to discuss technical things.

Sorry for Google, not for the coder.

These aren’t even good questions to ask an entry level hire, or any kind.

just one word popped into mind:

Seriously?

How many times are we going to repost this?

ageism

The problem is that a non qualified person is interviewing a candidate for Director of Engineering. These questions may be ok for a college hire for an entry level position. And even then it cannot be treated like a simple yes no thing.

The interviewer is also very bad at his job. You can replace him with a simple Google form.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com