> Recruiter: that's not the answer I have on my sheet of paper.
When I got a similar screening from GOOG, the recruiter confessed upfront to having these technical questions scripted and seemed much more flexible than this particular one.
> 7. what is the name of the KILL signal?
The question might have been "what is the default signal sent by 'kill'?" The answer to that question is SIGTERM and not SIGKILL. The recruiter may have asked it wrong, the question may have been written vaguely for the recruiter or the interviewee may have misunderstood/misheard the details of the question.
Also, if you can't have enough of a conversation with someone who's unfamiliar with the "kill" command to figure out exactly what signal they have in mind even when they're using the wrong words, and without getting upset at them or deciding that they're beneath you, you're not qualified to be a director of engineering.
That is true, but on the other hand, if the person reading the script stands on the wording of the question, as soon as they read the "correct" answer you've lost. There's now no recovering, because "obviously" now that you've heard the right answer you're just spinning to explain away your failure.
(As with others, I will stipulate that accuracy in this report may not be 100%, but I'm not necessarily willing to assign it 0% either, especially as I've encountered people like that myself.)
So the trick is to not answer the question immediately if you're unsure, but ask to clarify. Which, again, is a good skill in life (as an IC, and certainly as a director of engineering). If you're reviewing your coworker's code and they got something wrong, asking "Can you clarify what you meant here" will go over ten times better than "You're wrong" (and a hundred times better if they're not in fact wrong). Maybe this is a bug in human cognition, sure, but at a Google-sized company you can't get anything technical done without interfacing with buggy humans on a regular basis.
"The KILL signal? So you're calling the kill function with KILL as an argument, or typing kill dash KILL, or...?" would have cleared up the confusion immediately, because even a screener unfamiliar with the material would have said "Oh, that's not what I'm asking."
I do strongly believe that the questions as written down are not as reported in this blog post, because there are tons of other sources who have written about being asked this question in an initial screen, and they all phrase it as "What is the signal that the kill command sends."
It's possible that the process didn't permit much back and forth clarifying of concepts or questions. It does seem that way reading between the lines. I've had some similar experiences over the years (not with Google) so it seems at least plausible to me. It's also possible, if not likely, that the author of the OP was upset, felt slighted, and is not remembering things as clearly as he or she thinks.
When I got a similar screening from GOOG, the recruiter confessed upfront to having these technical questions scripted and seemed much more flexible than this particular one.
> 7. what is the name of the KILL signal?
The question might have been "what is the default signal sent by 'kill'?" The answer to that question is SIGTERM and not SIGKILL. The recruiter may have asked it wrong, the question may have been written vaguely for the recruiter or the interviewee may have misunderstood/misheard the details of the question.