Site Director Interview Questions
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Site Director interview questions shared by candidates
Are you ok with making $10.00 to $11.00 per hour?
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That is very low for a director position.
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Ridiculous
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That's minimum wage, so they require a degree for minimum wage?
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
What is your level of teaching experience?
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I have been a tutor to grades k-6 in math and language arts on an individual basis. I have also done in class small group tutoring to the same age for nearly 3 years and have done afterschool educator to the same group for nearly 3 years Less
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I have done in class small group tutoring to grades k-6 for nearly 3 years and an afterschool educator also for nearly three years to the same group as well as 12 years one on one with also the same group 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
What would you do if there was an emergency and you had to evacuate your children?
2 Answers
Really no questions were asked just a really informal weekend. It was strange. Nice people though
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A word of advice, be very vocal, speak up and be confrontational, we were polite and later were rejected although we were "well liked" we did not voice our opinions when we were feeling insulted Less
