Tech & Biz

Google Job Interview Puzzles, Questions, and Answers

by Gordon Clark | November 5, 2009 at 10:11 am

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Google is hiring again and is looking for the smartest employees. Lewis Lin, a job interview professional consultant made 140 questions and puzzles that a company like Google would use to weed out the normal people from the geniuses. Since yesterday when the questions were released people have been submitting their best answers. The Silicon Alley insider released its favorite 15 questions along with the best answers.

Some questions are simple simple:
Question: How many times a day does a clock's hands overlap?
Answer: 22

While some questions are pretty hard:
Question: Explain the significance of "dead beef."
Answer: DEADBEEF is a hexidecimal value that was used in debugging back in the mainframe/assembly days because it was easy to see when marketing and finding specific memory in pages of hex dumps. Most computer science graduates have seen this at least in their assembly language classes in college and that's why they expect software engineers to know it.

A few more questions:

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)?

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?

You have an empty room, and a group of people waiting outside the room. At each step, you may either get one person into the room, or get one out. Can you make subsequent steps, so that every possible combination of people is achieved exactly once?

The full 140 questions are here.

Give them a try but don't get stressed out if you can't figure them out. Some are designed to be really hard.

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