Software engineer Pierre Gauthier was recently interviewed for the position of Director of Engineering at Google, and decided to post the questions he faced during the interview.<\/p>\n
\u201cGoogle’s representative stated that both management and up-to-date coding skills were required – a rare mix,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut having exercised the former for more than two decades and the latter for almost four decades was not enough: I failed to give the right answers.\u201d<\/p>\n
He questioned whether Google raised the bar too high, or whether its\u00a0\u201crecruiting staff seriously lacked the skills they are supposed to rate\u201d.<\/p>\n
Here are the “highly technical” questions and their answers which Gauthier shared in his blog post<\/strong><\/a>.<\/p>\n What is the opposite function of malloc() in C?<\/strong><\/p>\n Answer: free()<\/p><\/blockquote>\n What Unix function lets a socket receive connections?<\/strong><\/p>\n Answer: listen()<\/p><\/blockquote>\n How many bytes are necessary to store a MAC address?<\/strong><\/p>\n Answer: six<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Sort the time taken by: CPU register read, disk seek, context switch, system memory read.<\/strong><\/p>\n Answer: CPU register read, system memory read, context switch, disk seek.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n What is a Linux inode?<\/strong><\/p>\n Answer: It’s file metadata.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n What Linux function takes a path and returns an inode?<\/strong><\/p>\n Answer: stat()<\/p><\/blockquote>\n What is the name of the KILL signal?<\/strong><\/p>\n Answer: “TERMINATE”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Why Quicksort is the best sorting method?<\/strong><\/p>\n Answer: Quicksort has the best big-O<\/p><\/blockquote>\n There’s an array of 10,000 16-bit values, how do you count the bits most efficiently?<\/strong><\/p>\n Answer: Use a lookup table and then sum the results<\/p><\/blockquote>\n What is the type of the packets exchanged to establish a TCP connection?<\/strong><\/p>\n Answer: It’s SYN, SYN-ACK, and ACK; if Google is down you will need to know this to diagnose what the problem is.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Software engineer Pierre Gauthier has published 10 questions which he faced when interviewed for a Director of Engineering position.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":23,"featured_media":152155,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[36,167],"class_list":["post-183102","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-software","tag-active","tag-google"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/183102"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/23"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=183102"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/183102\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":183116,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/183102\/revisions\/183116"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/152155"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=183102"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=183102"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=183102"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Now read:\u00a010 brain-straining Google interview questions<\/a><\/h3>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"