140 Google Interview Questions • Hacker News Board

Re: 140 Google Interview Questions

#41

Post by gcb » Tue, Nov 30, 2010, 5:52 AM UTC

jws wrote: post #35

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?

At google Brazil some crazy people found out the address and actually showed up on the building to complain about some non-sense happening in Orkut.

I guess they had their share of crazy advertisers hitting some random number (heh, just like recruiters) and hearing some joke from a employee

Re: 140 Google Interview Questions

#42

Post by kunjaan » Tue, Nov 30, 2010, 6:19 AM UTC

brianwillis wrote: post #5

>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.

There are apparently 5.7 million good piano tuners.

Re: 140 Google Interview Questions

#43

Post by sb » Tue, Nov 30, 2010, 7:56 AM UTC

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.

Re: 140 Google Interview Questions

#44

Post by KirinDave » Tue, Nov 30, 2010, 8:57 AM UTC

EricBurnett wrote: post #33

KirinDave wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 the…

An NDA would not and could not cover abuse, and I highly doubt it covers your impressions either (e.g. "it was terrible and the interviewers were all rude!"), so I don't really agree with your first point. For your second I can see where you're coming from, although at least in this case I don't see droves of people interviewing and then saying the process was terrible. But there should be (and perhaps is?) an easy w…

Buy me a beer and I'll tell you the story of my worst interview ever. I'm nice enough to the founder of that company not to name them here, but it was incredibly bad.

In fact, it was so bad I later got a written apology for what happened.

Re: 140 Google Interview Questions

#45

Post by kahawe » Tue, Nov 30, 2010, 9:54 AM UTC

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 understand where you are coming from and I just hate this fake hiring "voodoo" of trying to predict the future of a candidate by asking oh-so-elaborate questions and relying on oh-so-psychologically-awesome tricks.

Re: 140 Google Interview Questions

#46

Post by InclinedPlane » Tue, Nov 30, 2010, 10:23 AM UTC

brianwillis wrote: post #5

>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.

The point of these sorts of questions is not to find people who know how many piano tuners there are in the world, or even to arrive at a reasonable estimate (without good data you're going to be off by miles).

The point is instead to find people who have developed the ability and habit of "back of the envelope" calculation. Not everyone has developed this skill but it can very much elevate the level of many technical discussions. Simply being able to come up with a guess that is within a factor of 2, 10, or even 1,000 (depending on context) can be critically important and impact decisions. Such crude calculations can also serve as the skeleton from which to create more robust calculations with better data. Enrico Fermi was able to estimate the yield of the first ever nuclear bomb test using only his eyes and a few pieces of torn paper blown by the blast, he came within a factor of 2. Sometimes you don't have the most precise measuring instruments or complete data, being able to cope with that and yet come up with useful results is also important.

Re: 140 Google Interview Questions

#47

Post by ez77 » Tue, Nov 30, 2010, 10:45 AM UTC

  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?

Re: 140 Google Interview Questions

#48

Post by ez77 » Tue, Nov 30, 2010, 10:49 AM UTC

ez77 wrote: post #47

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?

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.

Re: 140 Google Interview Questions

#49

Post by jyiin » Tue, Nov 30, 2010, 11:14 AM UTC

ez77 wrote: post #47

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?

If we assume there's an even chance of having a boy or girl, the proportion of boys to girls is still 50/50. It's basic stats. These are independent events.

Re: 140 Google Interview Questions

#50

Post by radq » Tue, Nov 30, 2010, 11:25 AM UTC

ez77 wrote: post #48

ez77 wrote: post #47

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?

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.

> the answer may be anywhere between 0 and 1

0 and infinity, actually.

(sorry, couldn't resist)