Newsom's Uncomfortable Interview With Hank Plante
Chilling Account of a Muni Mugging
This Could Be Our Skyline, In a Couple of Decades
-thumb-110x110-460161.jpg)
Cops Get Tough With UC Berkeley Protesters
Mehserle Trial Will Move to L.A., Says Judge
A slew of alleged Google interview questions have been floating around the internet, and now we know for certain that we simply are not equipped to work for the giant who lords over the internet. Is this a written exam? Are you allowed to bring in your TI-81 calculator? Below, a few choice questions that you might be asked if you were applying for a stupid Product Manager job:
- 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!)
- How many golf balls can fit in a school bus?
- 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? [Note: We think the answer to this is you just crouch down next to the center and the blades would miss you. What do we win??]
- 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)?
Oh we've got one! You're riding the Google shuttle down to Mountain View, and someone is hogging all the Wi-Fi downloading a whole season of Battlestar Galactica. Using social skills and detective work, how do you determine who the guilty party is without making anyone cry, and how should they be punished?
add to stumble upon
add to reddit
tweet this
post to facebook
Looking for a new job, Jay?
Slow non-news day? "OMG COMPANY ASKS PROSPECTIVE EMPLOYEES TRICKY QUESTIONS!"
the answer to the clock one is 7.5 degrees
I interviewed with Google a long time ago, and these brain teasers are real. But you get q
But you get questions like this for any serious software engineering position. Getting the right answers is good, but it's more about seeing how you work through the problems.
I dunno. I'd rather hire someone who can find simple solutions to real problems, quickly, so I always ask stupid questions like "write a C function that calculates N factorial" or a reasonably tricky PERL regular expression matching problem that includes some escapes and make them put something into $1 and use it, on a pattern that makes sure they understand greedy matching.
But I guess I'm just "old school".
LOL ! I was subjected to a bunch of these at a recent Apple interview.
I suspect that the strongest effect of these types of interview questions is to find people who obsess over tricky little brain teasers to the point where they're willing to work 70 hours a week solving problems that most of us wouldn't give more than 2 minutes to before giving up.
What?! That guy didn't even really think about the golfball thing. There's no way he would ignore his boyfriend and work late 3 weeks in a row to track down an error message on our webserver!
I've interviewed at Google a handful of times and never got any brain teasers. I've been more amused by the fact that each interview I had was for the same department and each time I've gone back there is a whole different crop of employees who don't recognize the names of the people I interviewed with the year before. I guess they have high turnover.
1. 7.5 degrees.
2. All of them. No golf ball is larger than a school bus.
3. Die, as you are killed in the fall.
4. .325, I think, though it might also be .95.
Yeah, or try this one my buddy got in a consulting interview: what are the odds that a bird will crap on you when you are walking around in Manhattan?
1. Yes, 7.5
2. 200k or so, depending, asuming one inch diameter balls - (40x10x8 feet)(144 balls/cu ft) minus space taken up by seats plus spherical packing fudge factor
3. You'd be like an ant, able to sruvive any fall. Just jump out like a cockroach with your tiny, strong legs.
4. Way more than .325, something like .85, too distracted by AA ads to continue...
The probability of seeing a car in 10 minutes is 0.631597
1-e^((ln(0.05)/30) * 10)
how about: the probability that the interviewer's stock options are underwater at any given time?
I'm dying to know the answer to the blender question.
So are you allowed to google the answers?
I like how the top result for the clock question is from Yahoo Answers.