Google interview questions

[snopes]

Please note: The purpose of this thread is NOT to work out solutions to the following problems.

-------------------------------------------------------------------

Comment: I have recently seen a number of posts about "Google Interview
questions" I searched SNOPES to verify if Google truly does use such
questions in their interview process or if they are just (as Snopes proves
about many things) an urban legend. Examples are as follows:

http://tihomir.org/crazy-questions-a...job-interview/

1. How many golf balls can fit in a school bus?

2. You are shrunk to the height of a nickel and your mass is
proportionally reduced so as to maintain your original density. You are
then thrown into an empty glass blender. The blades will start moving in
60 seconds. What do you do?

3. How much should you charge to wash all the windows in Seattle?

4. How would you find out if a machine's stack grows up or down in memory?

5. Explain a database in three sentences to your eight-year-old nephew.

6. How many times a day does a clock's hands overlap?

7. You have to get from point A to point B. You don't know if you can get
there. What would you do?

8. Imagine you have a closet full of shirts. It's very hard to find a
shirt. So what can you do to organize your shirts for easy retrieval?

9. Every man in a village of 100 married couples has cheated on his wife.
Every wife in the village instantly knows when a man other than her
husband has cheated, but does not know when her own husband has. The
village has a law that does not allow for adultery. Any wife who can prove
that her husband is unfaithful must kill him that very day. The women of
the village would never disobey this law. One day, the queen of the
village visits and announces that at least one husband has been
unfaithful. What happens?

10. In a country in which people only want boys, every family continues to
have children until they have a boy. if they have a girl, they have
another child. if they have a boy, they stop. what is the proportion of
boys to girls in the country?

11. If the probability of observing a car in 30 minutes on a highway is
0.95, what is the probability of observing a car in 10 minutes (assuming
constant default probability)?

12. If you look at a clock and the time is 3:15, what is the angle between
the hour and the minute hands? (The answer to this is not zero!)

13. Four people need to cross a rickety rope bridge to get back to their
camp at night. Unfortunately, they only have one flashlight and it only
has enough light left for seventeen minutes. The bridge is too dangerous
to cross without a flashlight, and it's only strong enough to
support two people at any given time. Each of the campers walks at a
different speed. One can cross the bridge in 1 minute, another in 2
minutes, the third in 5 minutes, and the slow poke takes 10 minutes to
cross. How do the campers make it across in 17 minutes?

14. You are at a party with a friend and 10 people are present including
you and the friend. your friend makes you a wager that for every person
you find that has the same birthday as you, you get $1; for every person
he finds that does not have the same birthday as you, he gets $2. would
you accept the wager?

15. How many piano tuners are there in the entire world?

16. You have eight balls all of the same size. 7 of them weigh the same,
and one of them weighs slightly more. How can you find the ball that is
heavier by using a balance and only two weighings?

17. You have five pirates, ranked from 5 to 1 in descending order. The top
pirate has the right to propose how 100 gold coins should be divided among
them. But the others get to vote on his plan, and if fewer than half agree
with him, he gets killed. How should he allocate the gold in order to
maximize his share but live to enjoy it? (Hint: One pirate ends up with 98
percent of the gold.)

[Penny]

Sounds like the kind of questions that people used to attribute to Microsoft interviews (eg. "How would you move Mount Fiji?"). I wouldn't be surprised if they've just been reattributed.

[Chloe]

Originally Posted by snopes

14. You are at a party with a friend and 10 people are present including you and the friend. your friend makes you a wager that for every person you find that has the same birthday as you, you get $1; for every person he finds that does not have the same birthday as you, he gets $2. would you accept the wager?

No, I wouldn't. Now prove that I'm wrong, and that I, in fact, would.

[BoKu]

I interviewed at Google last year. For me it was just the usual strengths and value proposition stuff.

[RBCal]

A friend of mine did subcontract work for them. He absolutely hated it.

6. How many times a day does a clock's hands overlap?

Well considering they're pinned in the middle the answer is all the time.

7. You have to get from point A to point B. You don't know if you can get
there. What would you do?

Move point B closer to point A.

[lord_feldon]

12 should be 7.5 degrees, if I calculated it right.

[Mateus]

Originally Posted by snopes

Please note: The purpose of this thread is NOT to work out solutions to the following problems.

I've created a thread here, if TPTB approve, of course.

[Bryan With a 'Y']

Originally Posted by snopes

Please note: The purpose of this thread is NOT to work out solutions to the following problems.

Among these folks, I think that's a little like dangling a catnip toy in front of a cat while saying "The purpose of this toy is NOT frantic clawing and chasing."

But anyway, it looks like most of these are slightly dressed-up old classics - number 9, for example, is a classic problem that I first saw presented as blue eyes and brown eyes - there are no reflective surfaces available and eye color is absolutely NEVER discussed, but anyone with blue eyes must kill him/herself upon finding out. All 100 residents of the island have blue eyes, but none of them know it. There is an ugly stone idol which one day proclaims "There is at least one blue-eyed person on the island," which is assumed to be the absolute truth. Where this problem always lost me is that with all of that, the villagers are all nevertheless assumed to reason with 100% perfect logic.

ETA: I think that's a good call, Mateus.

[lord_feldon]

Oops, I didn't see the request. Everyone pretend my response above isn't there.

[We'veBeenHad]

Originally Posted by snopes

16. You have eight balls all of the same size. 7 of them weigh the same,
and one of them weighs slightly more.

An eightball is three-and-a-half grams. If you have 7 I think it's a felony. Not that I have any reason to know this.

Oh...what was the question again? Google? Well inside the building it looks kind of like a preschool, with primary colors and primary shapes abounding. That's all I know for sure.

[Errata]

Originally Posted by BoKu

I interviewed at Google last year. For me it was just the usual strengths and value proposition stuff.

But what position is it for? Presumably these kinds of questions would be for engineers.

[Insensible Crier]

I have heard that Google asks weird questions like these for engineers and developers and some of them are not meant to have a definite answer, they are more interested in your thought process and "out of the box" thinking. I will say that this was at least third hand information I heard so it may be complete tripe.

[Errata]

I know several programmers who left to work for Google, and a bunch who interviewed but didn't take the job. But it seemed like more of that was happening a couple of years ago back when they went public and were hyper expanding, and not so much recently. But I never thought to ask about this, and I can't remember anyone mentioning it one way or the other. I'll try to remember to ask something about this if it comes up again.

One thing that a few people mentioned about them was how cagey they were about what it was that people would be working on. It was a bit of a turn off for people applying there not to know what they would actually do. Part of it was obviously that they wanted to keep quiet what they're working on with all those people, but there was also concern that they didn't really have a clear direction they were going in, they were just flush with cash. Since then its become a little more clear the sorts of things that they have people working on, but its still less than clear how they're intending to use all that tremendous manpower to actually turn a profit. They make good money selling ads on searches, but that doesn't require nearly so many people to implement, and the little side apps they've been releasing don't show a clear business model.

[Tarquin Farquart]

Would they ask you these questions as part of the interview and expect an answer straight away?

[bufungla]

CNN-a-chow

But no company has taken brainteaser recruiting quite as far as Google, which famously reeled in engineers three years ago by posting complex math problems on a billboard along Highway 101 in Silicon Valley. Passing motorists were invited to submit their solutions to an undisclosed website. (The site's URL was hidden in the answer.)

If you got to the site, you were asked a second, more difficult question. If you answered that one correctly, you were invited to submit your resume. Once you got to the Googleplex for an interview, a favorite question was this: You are shrunk to the height of a nickel and your mass is proportionally reduced so as to maintain your original density. You are then thrown into an empty glass blender. The blades will start moving in 60 seconds. What do you do?

[Chloe]

Height of a nickel on its edge, or lying down? If lying down, and proportionate to your current body, you should be able to stay under the blades by a factor of ten.

[Stoneage Dinosaur]

Originally Posted by bufungla

CNN-a-chow

The article gives the first three questions from the OP, but doesn't mention the rest, maybe they have been taken from somewhere else. Some of the questions, such as 10, 13 and 16, are brainteasers with definite answers (question 3 here is similar to 16 above (ETA: and Q38 is the same as 13)), whereas some of the others seem quite like those encountered in UK university entrance interviews:

Oxbridge asks: Are you cool and how wet is a cow?

[Ali Infree]

I know that a couple of these have been puzzlers on Car Talk on National Public Radio: # 13, 16, 17. I think.
And Car Talk ain't hiring.

Ali" 42 " Infree

[KathyB]

Google's Algorithm For Finding Best Employees

Google is known for hazing prospects in interviews with intractable brain teasers. And it once tried to attract candidates by placing some particularly difficult problems on billboards.

Mathematica's Google Aptitude has the solution, as well as some questions from "The Google Labs Aptitude Test.". The GLAT is apparently real; the link to it is the "official Google blog."