It's absolutely cheating if you don't tell the interviewer. If a candidate doesn't know X, then just tell me, and I'll explain X! That's quicker than Googling and they'll get a better answer. But the whole point is to figure out which Xs they know, for many values of X.
If you're asking a question that is effectively, correctly, and decisively addressed by a single Google query made in real time during the interview, the fault is with the question, not with the candidate.
I basically agree (although it sounds like in this case, the candidate only Googled for help on some part of the question, so who knows.)
But the fault is still with the candidate. It's unethical to get external help in an interview without telling the interviewer what you're doing, full stop, end of story. It doesn't matter if you don't think much of the question. Doing so screws up the interviewer's ability to actually compare you meaningfully to their other candidates.
Further, a technical interview question is rarely designed to have you solve that question but show that you have an understanding of the subset of knowledge to solve that kind of question.
If they want you to solve bit manipulation questions they could come up with something terribly obscure and difficult to explain or they could give you one that can be solved by anyone with the basic knowledge of bitwise operators a bit of problem solving. Having to Google this answer either shows failure on your behalf or the inability to actually sit down and address the problem critically before running off to find help from others (who will often be unable to help you on actual problems)
Ridiculous. The question here isn't "how would you design X" or "estimate the amount of time to do Y" or "explain how you'd debug Z" (all infinitely better interview questions, by the way). It was "how do I perform a particular bit manipulation in C". Google is a fine resource for questions like that.
I also sincerely believe that the more you know about C bit manipulation (particularly the kind of manipulation you need to, e.g., figure out whether a UTF-8 encoding is nonminimal), the less unreasonable that Google search seems.
I've been a C programmer since 1994 and interviewed lord knows how many C programmers and I'd never flunk someone for looking this up, nor would I care if they told me if they had looked it up. Obviously, 'cletus feels differently, but I think he's wrong.
Maybe if interviewing for developer positions wasn't so fucked in the first place, a candidate wouldn't feel like telling the interviewer that he used google as an aide would diminish his chances.
