Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

140 Google Interview Questions

blog.seattleinterviewcoach.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 68 posts

Re: 140 Google Interview Questions

#21

Post by tzs »

nhashem wrote: post #6
russellallen wrote: post #2

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!

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 sw…

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.

Re: 140 Google Interview Questions

#22

Post by JeanPierre »

klochner wrote: post #7

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.

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.

Re: 140 Google Interview Questions

#23

Post by KirinDave »

EricBurnett wrote: post #17
daeken wrote: post #11

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.)

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.

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.

Re: 140 Google Interview Questions

#26

Post by EricBurnett »

KirinDave wrote: post #23
EricBurnett wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Sorry, how is that evil? If questions are known they can't be used anymore, and often confidential information can come up in interviews, so it seems only sensible. I don't remember hearing of it ever being used against someone, so it's really just a precaution against someone finding out and then disclosing something really important. I suppose I could have said that not discussing people's questions is only polite, for all the weight it carries.

*EDIT: added last sentence.

Re: 140 Google Interview Questions

#27

Post by ramanujam »

hugh3 wrote: post #16

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 candidat…

The same thing happened to me in a GOOG interview. Reading your comment, it just came as a picture in front of my eyes! I succeeded in the first question and gave some brilliant answers until we decided that we spent enough time on that part(aka, i ran out of ideas). I was relieved and we moved on to the next question. I didn't nail that one...no wonder i didn't make it to the next round!

Re: 140 Google Interview Questions

#28

Post by olalonde »

hugh3 wrote: post #16

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 candidat…

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 :)

Re: 140 Google Interview Questions

#29

Post by KirinDave »

EricBurnett wrote: post #26
KirinDave wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sorry, how is that evil? If questions are known they can't be used anymore, and often confidential information can come up in interviews, so it seems only sensible. I don't remember hearing of it ever being used against someone, so it's really just a precaution against someone finding out and then disclosing something really important. I suppose I could have said that not discussing people's questions is only polite,…

I understand Google has reasons why they might want to NDA their process, but from the perspective of a potential employee, being asked to sign an NDA for the interview is only a liability. Interviews can be unreasonable (and sometimes even abusive) environments, and I want to know about that before walking into that. Barring that, I want to warn people about bad interview experiences.

If people cannot talk about their interview experiences, there's no opportunity for employers to receive censure for bad interview practices.

Besides, an interview is not the SATs. If this really is the logic for the interview process, then Google interviews are even more broken than I thought.

Re: 140 Google Interview Questions

#30

Post by neeleshs »

Jach wrote: post #12

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

Doesn't it tell something about the interview itself? Canned questions in an interview are at best for filtering really bad candidates, and not that effective there either, precisely because of what you said.
Post reply on HN