
140 Google Interview Questions - fogus
http://blog.seattleinterviewcoach.com/2009/02/140-google-interview-questions.html
======
russellallen
I must admit to hating interviews and especially these sort of questions. I'll
happily sit down and chat to people about any of the areas I know about, but
these sort of gotcha questions just make me think 'why I am here justifying
myself to these people'?

Watch me juggle! Watch me somersault! Watch me do and say pointless things to
impress you with how smart I am!

~~~
nhashem
Almost every interview I've ever been on that consisted of these kinds of
questions, I've gotten an offer. I agree it's a mostly useless exercise in
trying to determine someone's technical skill, but as an interviewee,
ultimately it makes more sense to just "play the game" and memorize the
mostly-exhaustive list of questions.

Conversely, one interview I do remember where I didn't end up getting an
offer, was going swimmingly talking about pirates splitting gold and manhole
covers. And then one interviewer asked me with so much Perl experience, why
hadn't I published anything on CPAN? Boom, done.

I still haven't published anything on CPAN, but could I interest you in this
scale and 8 balls I have here?

~~~
tzs
I'd answer the question of why I haven't published on CPAN (which I haven't,
and I primarily program in Perl for work) is that I don't have the time. I've
published some small add-ons for Warhammer Online (Lua, not Perl), and have
found that even such a simple thing as that, where it is common for add-on
authors to abandon their add-ons and users do not expect much support, was a
lot of time. That's because if I put it out there, I'm going to support it. If
user's ask for features--even features I won't use--that make sense, I want to
try to add them.

If publishing something in such a specialized and restricted universe is so
much work, I would expect that publishing and maintaining (to my quality
standards) a CPAN module, which would have a potentially much larger audience,
would simply take more time than I have available.

~~~
follower
My current policy is that unless a piece of code suddenly makes the world a
worse place to be in (hopefully I haven't done that yet :) ) I'll release
something (normally on my website) and make no further commitment than that.

My philosophy is that it's still better to have your code out there and
unsupported where someone can have the option of using it, rather than leaving
it stuck on a hard drive never to be seen or useful to the world at large.

While it pains me not to answer every person who emails me about code I put
out there, I try to live with it. Plus, it gives them a chance to solve their
problem for themselves. :)

In order to get to that point I had to get past the "Oh noes, what if
people/future employer/rockstars see my code deride it, laugh in my face and
not give me a job because the hacky code I put out is..hacky". I still have
flashbacks though. :)

I would encourage you to lower your standards for publishing your code. Is
there a "CPAN Unplugged" where lower standards are explicitly accepted and
okay?

------
brown9-2
The author of "Crack the Coding Interview" and careercup.com claims[1] this
list is very, very fake (for "software engineer" questions). She claims to
have served on Google's hiring committees for over 3 years, so I would take
her word over this blog's author.

In my own experience Google does not ask these types of questions.

If you do your own research on glassdoor.com and other sites where candidates
self-report their interviewing experience, you will find almost no reports of
candidates for SE positions being asked these types of "brainteasers".

1: [http://www.technologywoman.com/2010/05/17/debunking-the-
goog...](http://www.technologywoman.com/2010/05/17/debunking-the-google-
interview-myth/)

~~~
jkent
I got asked brainteasers in one of my (many) Google interviews. Non-
engineering position though - close to Product Marketing. I was asked to use
the board.

Certain interviewers have preferences for certain types of questions. I had
questions similar to the listed ones in each category (including basic ones in
Engineering).

Generally in their engineering interviews, you're expected to know sorting and
search algorithms and their big-O complexity - and expected to code on the
board.

------
hugh3
One good interview trick I learned:

First, you only ask one of these silly questions during the interview. And it
should be one that makes the candidate sweat and think out loud a lot, but one
where they'll eventually be successful -- I like the one where you ask the
candidate to think of as many uses as possible for _X_ and you just keep going
until they run out of ideas.

As soon as this question is over, the candidate is relieved. This is when you
take the opportunity to ask them _the_ key question of the interview, whatever
that may be, while they're at their most unguarded.

So watch out for these questions: sometimes the interviewer is just trying to
soften you up for the next question.

~~~
olalonde
I once had an interviewer suddenly ask me if I liked beer. My first reaction
was to quickly guess what kind of answer he was looking for. Obviously, his
goal was that to see if I was being honest or just trying to give the right
answers. Anyways, I told him I liked beer :)

~~~
mynegation
I see you are in Canada and in North America questions like that may get the
interviewer into the legal trouble.

------
cdr
It probably doesn't have to be repeated here, but most of these are just
random apocryphal interview questions - not anything representative of what
would actually be asked at Google. There are good sources for actual Google
interview questions if you care to look for them.

~~~
mech4bg
Agreed to this - Google asks you straightforward (but difficult) computer
science stuff.

------
klochner
I find it hard to believe they really ask devs the manhole cover question,
that's been making the rounds for well over a decade now.

~~~
JeanPierre
Well, maybe that's _exactly_ why they ask that question:

<http://hebig.org/blog/003029.php>

Sometimes, doing your own reasoning on a "smart" question leads to new ideas.
Just ask Galileo.

------
sb
I have worked through the questions for a software engineering position quite
a while back, and while most of the problems were rather boring, there are
some quite nice ones in there, for example there is a very simple and nice
solution to this one:

    
    
      Given a Data Structure having first n integers 
      and next n chars. A = i1 i2 i3 ... iN c1 c2 
      c3 ... cN. Write an in-place algorithm to rearrange 
      the elements of the array ass A = i1 c1 i2 c2 ... 
      iN cN.

------
daeken
I'm surprised, my first big question from them wasn't listed: You have search
results coming in from a thousand servers, as a big stream. How do you sort
them by Pagerank and send it down to the client? How do you do this on a page-
by-page basis? (This was for a software engineering position on the build
tools team, about a month ago.)

~~~
EricBurnett
FYI, I believe interview questions are covered under the NDA, so if you did
interview (and presumably had to sign an NDA at the time) you shouldn't
actually be talking about the questions you were asked.

~~~
KirinDave
Google NDAs their interview process? Another strike against their "don't be
evil" record. I'm not sure why I even pretend to expect differently now.

~~~
brown9-2
Their NDA does not state that the interview process itself is "confidential".
It only states that as a part of the hiring process Google may disclose
certain information to the candidate that it considers "confidential", and
that you as the receiver are only to use this information for the purpose that
Google disclosed it to you (i.e., your hiring).

It would be quite a stretch to interpret this as meaning that the questions
asked as a part of the interview, or Google's process itself, is
"confidential".

At the rate Google interviews, it'd be quite an effort to make sure that no
candidate shared information about their interview questions, the format, etc.

Also, this type of agreement during the hiring process is pretty standard for
medium-to-large size companies.

~~~
jemfinch
> It would be quite a stretch to interpret this as meaning that the questions
> asked as a part of the interview, or Google's process itself, is
> "confidential".

As far as I've heard from _anyone_ here, that's the interpretation. Questions
are not to be shared, otherwise we'd spend all our time generating new
interview questions and never actually getting any work done.

The NDA covers _information_ , not experience.

------
cdibona
You people do understand that no one should ever ask the manhole question,
right?

------
weel
I interviewed at Google today and I recall their documents specifically saying
that they would appreciate my _not_ disclosing their questions.

~~~
JustinSeriously
Did they actually say "appreciate"?

------
btilly
When I interviewed, I was asked exactly one of the given software engineer
questions. And a lot that weren't on the list.

Also if you do well on an interview question, a lot of Google interviewers
will then choose to dive deeper on the question, and start to ask more
difficult follow-up questions.

Anyone who thinks they can memorize a few of these and then breeze through the
interview process will have a nasty surprise coming.

------
brianwillis
>How many piano tuners are there in the entire world?

I can't see how there would be a correlation between answering this question
well and being a good Product Manager.

What's most upsetting about this style of question is the 'holier than thou'
attitude that comes along with them. If you're not willing to play the game,
don't expect to be seen as a good candidate.

~~~
kunjaan
There are apparently 5.7 million good piano tuners.

~~~
jkent
How did you arrive at that answer?

------
ez77

      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?
    

Thoughts?

~~~
ez77
Smart-ass, no-way-getting-an-offer answer: if we assume gender selection to be
truly random, the answer may be _anywhere_ between 0 and 1, period.

~~~
radq
> the answer may be anywhere between 0 and 1

0 and infinity, actually.

(sorry, couldn't resist)

------
num1
And now that these are published you can rest assured that they will never be
used in a Google interview again.

------
jws
_Google Interview: AdWords Associate

• How would you deal with an angry or frustrated advertisers on the phone?_

And this would be important to google how? Since when did they have telephones
installed for customers?

~~~
PakG1
The companies who buy ad space are served by real salespeople, no? Google
product end users for the most case are not Google's customers. Rather, access
to end user eyeballs are the product Google sells to the real customers, the
advertisers.

------
Jach
Just remember, it's _cheating_ if you read these and then go to a Google
interview where they use the same questions!

~~~
ig1
[http://imranontech.com/2008/04/01/studying-for-job-
interview...](http://imranontech.com/2008/04/01/studying-for-job-interviews-
isnt-cheating/)

~~~
Jach
I suppose considering HN was somewhat split on the issue my sarcasm isn't
completely obvious.

