Engineering director Interview Questions
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Engineering Director interview questions shared by candidates
What would you do if your coworker anounced two days before launch that they were not going to deliver and in fact had not been working on their deliverables as previously stated in prior meetings.
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Didn't envision myself getting into this situation but would mitigate if all else failed. Less
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I would first determine how far away the deliverables were from completion to see if the situation could be salvaged. Would additional resources help? Longer hours? If the situation was not salvageable, I'd do an impact assessment and estimate the time to correct, meet with my direct supervisor and plan to notify the shareholders as soon as possible Less
I was interviewed for DoE role and the process went for roughly 2 months. All the 5 rounds were taken by senior people but I was asked the same questions in all the 5 rounds on tell me about your teams and challenges. I am not sure if they have any process whatsoever about hiring as I have seen similar feedback at a junior level. When you are interviewing any candidate you want to explore various aspects at that level and each panelist is designated to cover one aspect so that the interview rounds are not repeated. In fact in my last round with the CEO I had asked the question that why there have been no questions on problem solving, design and architecture and I didn't get any convincing answer. After 2-3 weeks of follow up after the last round I was given reasons for delay like change in hierarchy etc etc. I was finally informed that they won't go ahead with the case for some very very vague reason on "leadership".. The interviews were so shallow in nature that it is hard to reject anyone. There were no follow up questions or in depth grilling on answers given by me. To be very honest I am not at all bitter with the rejection because I am pretty sure the reason for the rejection is not lack of leadership skills. And I say that confidently because if that was the reason for me to get rejected they would have rejected me earlier as all the interviews were just repeat. And if that was true won’t it be better to cut the loop earlier instead of wasting everyone’s time? I believe my questions around the location of Bangalore office, commute and attracting top talent in that location were the main reasons for them to not pursue with my case. My reasons for asking those questions was my belief that every org is run by top talent and since most of the startups (read talent) are present in South Bangalore and due to Bangalore traffic many of them may not want to commute long distance and how would Skylo hire top talent when they are located in North Bangalore. May be they thought I would not join and hence they didn’t offer. I believe with every reject you introspect and see where you can improve. Sadly I have nothing to introspect in this case… One last thing please hire some senior folks in the TA team who are professional and not call candidates on Sunday morning 8:30 am to schedule interviews. Also if they give an ETA on updates to candidate they must get back to them whether they have an update or not instead of candidates chasing them for updates. Please ask them not to give vague response like change in hierarchy and other confusing reasons for delay. Hiring is an extremely important area for a company so please treat it seriously
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Well I respectfully disagree that they are goons or fraud. I wrote the feedback as thought I was rejected for not right reasons and they can definitely improve on their hiring process and TA team but I would absolutely NOT endorse your feedback. Less
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Very nice review. This is very helpful. I appreciate such honest people like you who takes their time out to help many. Thanks Less
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You are lucky that you are not trapped by them. Its a company of frauds and HR/TA are goons. Thanks for such candid review. All the very best. Less
State your top 3 strengths and top 3 weaknesses, as fast as you can. Go!
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I feel this question is mainly to understand how much you know yourself. Do you come up with cookie cutter answers or are you responding by being true to yourself. Less
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Luckily, I studied this beforehand!
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I'd honestly pause and ask what the goals of the question are. If they're asking this to see if I'm going to treat it like a project management question, a project manager shouldn't ever hurry the answer. If they're asking this because they think it's just a great question, I'm not entirely sure I'd want to work with a team they hired. Less
How do you put in place testing for a product that might cause personal injury to the user?
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You said "after sending your resume initially, they called after couple of weeks.." couple of weeks means after how many weeks ? Less
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After I sent the resume in, I received a call from the hiring manager about 2-3 weeks later. After that phone interview I didn't hear anything from them for about 6-8 weeks. Less
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My answer was along the lines of knowing the requirements of the product and testing to those. That includes understanding any federal, medical, and industry regulations and guidelines that must be followed for a product. Identifying requirements from all sources is key and that includes safety and regulatory requirements. Less
The interview process primarily focused on my experience in my current role and how I saw it relating to the responsibilities of the open position.
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Did they give you a tour?WHat was the expectation from you?DID they convey you?
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Was there any question On Automotive division or programming?
Hardest time in your life
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Explained a time where my personal life made my exams a lot harder.
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Hi, what kind of questions were asked in the interview at the assessment centre?
code in the language of your choice: A site has 4,320,000 users. The users are sequentially numbered -- each user has a user_id between 1 and 4320000. You want to slowly roll out a new feature to all users, at a consistent rate of X users per second. The roll-out should start at noon today, beginning with the newest user (id 4320000). The rollout should last two days, so user_id 1 gets the feature around noon two days from now. $Write a function to determine whether the feature is currently enabled for a given user_id: can_use_new_feature(int user_id) -> bool.
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Total seconds in 2 days = 172800 Divide total users 4320000/172800(seconds) = 25 users processed every second global start_time = unix_timestamp(start date noon) global users_per_second = 25 global total_users = 4320000 function can_use_new_feature(user_id) { var current_timestamp = unix_timestamp(current_time) var elapsed_seconds = timestamp_diff_to_seconds(current_timestamp, start_time) var processed_users = total_users - (users_per_second * elapsed_seconds) return (bool) user_id >=processed_users } Less
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There's a lot of elements to typically cover in these questions, clarifications, scoping, making sure you're answering the actual question the interviewer is looking for you to answer, etc. Could be worth doing a mock interview with one of the Prepfully Tumblr Director of Site Reliability Engineering experts... they've worked in the role so they clearly know how to get through the interview. prepfully.com/practice-interviews Less
How many computers would it take to run gmail.
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Assume that gmail has 2 bln of users (there are 3 bln internet users around the world and almost every internet user around the world has a gmail account). Assume that average size of mailbox is 500Mb (I've worked at many email services and know what I'm saying). 2 bln by 500Mb is 1000pb (petabytes). If gmail stores each email 3 times (2 times is a good choice, but since users' mailboxes are scattered around the storage cluster then 2 collapsed hard disks at the same moment could result in some data lost while the possibility of 3 hard disk have collapsed in the different data centers at the same time is negligibly low) then total is 3000pb. But I'm completely sure that gmail has deduplication and gmail has text parts of emails zipped. The first measure can save around 50% of space (the most of the mail store - it's attachments, and attachments are usually sent by person, so an attachment appears twice - in an inbox folder and in a sent folder). The second measure can save around 20% of space (this is the approximate total size of all text parts of mailings that could loose their weight by times). So 3000Pb are reduced by 70% to again 1000Pb. A 36x4Tb storage server has a 144Tb capacity. 1000Pb divide by 144Tb is about 7000. Why is it 36x4Tb? Because 36 is as far as I know economically feasible maximum number of disks per server. And 4Tb is economically feasible maximum disk size. I mean here that the more disks per server the less is the cost of the server other-than-disk parts per byte of storage but to the limit after that other-than-disk parts become more expensive. So is about the disk size - the bigger the disk size the cheaper is the byte stored on it, but to the limit of 4Tb. Of course gmail is not only storage service. There are also web services, smtp, imap, pop3, MX, antispam and so on. All of these services just process data and they don't have to store anything large (maybe there are some databases negligible compared to the email storage to store user credentials for example). A service does not necessarily needs a separate server. And storage servers luckily have a plenty of CPU time and some memory. So, the storage server's CPU time, memory and small portion of the disk could be used for data processing and for some small databases needed to web services, smtp, pop3, imap and so on. Google would not be Google, if they used a lot of additional servers for the life of the email system, except the email storage servers. That's why the correct answer is 7000 servers. Less
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These sorts of questions don't have answers. The real answer is to think out loud about what would be required in terms of bandwidth, storage, computing power, etc. for all of the different elements: receiving, sending, website, spam filtering, addressbook lookup, ... Less