Some Crazy Google Job Interview Questions
Tihomir has a long list of questions a friend of his was asked at a Google job interview. These are always fun to check out, so read the list and see if you can answer any of them.
I like the last question, the one about the pirates, but the hint kind of gives it away. The answer’s here, but it wouldn’t work, and you’d still wind up dead.
The pictures above come from a Business 2.0 article about the brain teasers, which seems to indicate that a number of the questions are interested in seeing if you can make large estimates quickly. Like, these questions and answers:
How many golf balls can fit in a school bus?
About 500,000, assuming the bus is 50 balls high, 50 balls wide, and 200 balls long
How much should you charge to wash all the windows in Seattle?
Assuming 10,000 city blocks, 600 windows per block, five minutes per window, and a rate of $20 per hour, about $10 million
Those estimates could be extremely wrong, and I’d consider anyone who even attempted to answer the questions an idiot and unhirable, but apparently it’s exactly what Google wants. Is a school bus fifty golf balls tall? Well, fifty golf balls are 7 feet high, if stacked perfectly on top of each other. So, it’s possible, but it’s a crazy question, and requires knowledge of the height of a golf ball (1.68 inches), ignoring the seats on the bus, ignoring the logistics of getting golf balls on a bus, ignoring method of stacking (it’s impossible to stack round objects perfectly in any efficient manner) and ignoring if the bus will break under the weight of 500,000 golf balls (50,625 pounds).
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