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| 7/15 |
| 2009/11/5-19 [Industry/Jobs] UID:53505 Activity:low |
10/5 Google interviews, exposed. In another word, it's not very
different from Netscape's former interviews, Microsoft's
former interviews, and HP's former interviews when they
were still in their infancy:
http://www.businessinsider.com/15-google-interview-questions-that-will-make-you-feel-stupid-2009-11
http://blog.seattleinterviewcoach.com/2009/02/140-google-interview-questions.html#
Yes, they still care about your GPA, even if you worked
10 years and you're well into the 30s.
\_ the Rickety rope bridge question cannot be solved.
What's up?
\_ nevermind I Googled the solution and it exists
\_ You fail. (1+2->1->5+10->2->1+2).
\_ They asked me my SAT score and I was in my 30s at the time.
\_ Any employer that does that or ask for GPA needs to eff off.
I'd tell them to shove it and I scored well on my SAT. Maybe
they want my kindergarten report card, too? Do they drug test?
\_ I interviewed, education and GPA never came up. MANY detailed technical
questions did come up. They basically drilled me about things until
we reached a point that I couldn't explain any further what they asked me.
There were no stupid puzzle problems. It was an exhausting, difficult
interview and I didn't get the job.
\_ I interviewed, education and GPA never came up. MANY detailed
technical
questions did come up. They drilled me about things until
we reached a point that I couldn't explain any further what they
asked me. There were no stupid puzzle problems. It was an
exhausting, difficult interview and I didn't get the job.
\_ are they similar to the questions above? How accurate
is the link above? Did you answer the questions correctly?
\_ I think there's a healthy level of BS in that article. I didn't
go for Product Manager. I am not sure from the context if
their version of Product Manager is technical or glorified
time tracking. The manhole cover problem has been an infamous
Microsoft interview question for 20 years. What kind of nerd
doesn't know what 0xdeadbeef is? I didn't get asked any
puzzle questions. Oh there's my buddy the @#$@## pirate problem.
\_ This article is a load of crap. This 'answer' to this
'famous google interview question' is 'wrong'
http://www.businessinsider.com/answers-to-15-google-interview-questions-that-will-make-you-feel-stupid-2009-11#youre-the-captain-of-a-pirate-ship-11
\_ The question is poorly worded, you need to ask a bunch of
questions to make sure that the assumptions are correct.
\_ ok my friend made it through 2 phone, and 5 physical
interviews for SRE, got good marks from everyone, but the
hiring committee declined to try to hire him because he didn't
have a masters or phd.
\_ That is bullshit. I know lots of SREs who are not MS.
Actually most are not! The review process is on a point
system. If 4/5 people gave good remarks, he's pretty much
in the game. Something happened to the hiring committee.
There's a lot to be said about recruiters. Some are ok,
but most are bad contractors. -googler |
| 7/15 |
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| www.businessinsider.com/15-google-interview-questions-that-will-make-you-feel-stupid-2009-11 That's good news for thousands of junior managers and software developers out there hoping to find safe harbor during this recessionary storm. Worse yet, even if you meet all those requirements, you still have to go in for your Google interview. Nov 4, 4:29 PM said: You work for a digital age media company who has already achieved superior market dominance in an industry rife with failure and turnover. Your company's stock, though depressed, still sells for multiples above its competition and the option pool is pretty full and limited. The company's single main product continues to grow its revenues nicely but has failed at virtually all attempts to broaden its product line so it remains reliant on its single huge product which may come under government anti-trust action at some point in the future to say nothing of two leading competitors aiming to unseat it. It's only other breakthrough products are given away free or at nominal charge with no discernable profitable business model. Is it a good career choice to join or stay with this firm even though they pride themselves on asking stupid quiz questions to gauge your intelligence and make you feel very special if you are offered a position? Your company's stock, though depressed, still sells for multiples above its competition and the option pool is pretty full and limited. The company's single main product continues to grow its revenues nicely but has failed at virtually all attempts to broaden its product line so it remains reliant on its single huge product which may come under government anti-trust action at some point in the future to say nothing of two leading competitors aiming to unseat it. It's only other breakthrough products are given away free or at nominal charge with no discernable profitable business model. Is it a good career choice to join or stay with this firm even though they pride themselves on asking stupid quiz questions to gauge your intelligence and make you feel very special if you are offered a position? Interviewer wants to gauge your problem solving skill which is very important in engineering, especially in SW engineering. Again, whatever they have been doing seemed to have worked. Dean Wormer: So if you are the founders, do you sell more than the $2 Billion you already sold :-)? On the other hand Google is in no rush to monetize Maps etc, think of MSFT and its cash cow, the Office. If the heavy ball isn't in the group of 6, you know it's one of the remaining 2 and so you put those two in the scale and determine which one. If the heavy ball is in the 6, you have narrowed it down to 3 Of those 3, pick any 2 and put them on the scale. If the heavy ball is in that group of 2, you know which one it is. If both balls are of equal weight, then the heavy ball is the one you sat to the side. Of course, questions like that don't prove anything about ability... Dean Wormer: This one has multiple correct answers IMO You could also say that round man hole covers are more easily managed since it only takes one person to work it. You can roll a round manhole cover wherever you want, it would take two people to lift a square one. Also, maybe they're round because the pipes they cover are round. Again, it could be much easier to roll steal into a tube and slice off a round slab rather than make a square piece. Maybe round manhole covers are cheaper to make than a square one. The phone number question is a private/public key question. You provide a key that enables the receiver to encode the response but you hold on to the key that enables you to decode it. chad: Round objects are, by design, stronger than square ones, as their are no 90 degree angle points. Airline windows are arched for a reason, to handle the high level of pressure evenly around the edges (a square one would blow out); likewise you will never find a rectangular shaped wristwatch crystal/bezel that is submersible beyond a couple of meters in depth. also approximate the shape of a human so little wasted space trying to get in. I've been through a 15" manhole -- ugly but doable at 160 lbs. Since they are usually cast, making the various shapes is no biggy once you have the mold. Joannie: Guys stop trying to find other lame ass reasons why manhole covers are round. As the previous poster said it so it doesn't fall through. Seriously, you don't want a heavy solid metal manhole cover falling on your head, even though it sounds like some of you might deserve it. I have heard this before, but you wouldn't think Google would be the type of company to care about GPA. I'd expect this from some stuffy old bank, but not from a "new age" company. kryptic: GPA is no indication of who is "smartest" that is nonsense, it is an indication of who likely studied more and did better on exams, period. I've worked with many engineers who had outstanding GPA's but can not engineer for squat, can't create, suck at troubleshooting and even have a hard time recalling much of the material they supposedly Aced in college. questions, where you have to know the answer to get it right, and do nothing to gauge a prospective employee's skills. Some of them are simple math/probability quizzes that are fine but not very useful if the applicant has a 40 GPA from Harvard. But if it's a girl at the first attempt, they try again. For this 2nd baby, there's a 50% chance the second child is a boy or a girl. Model this in excel and repeat until the answer approaches a nice, even ratio. F Them: first poster is correct, the ratio is still the standard 50/50. Look at the population as a whole, instead of couple by couple and you have done nothing to change the ratio of male births to female. Just because one couple stops trying after they get a boy on the first try, but there are other couples still trying. That is to say look at the births as a total # of "tries" at %50 ... change "boy/girl" to "hit/miss" on a target with 50% accuracy. When a shooter hits, they stop shooting, but another shooter steps in and tries for a hit... zzzzzzzzzzz: Dude, it doesn't matter if everyone shoots at once, or not. It doesn't matter if you shoot a million times or you stop for whatever reason. If you don't do anything to the probability you don't change the outcome. cantandwill: Behavioral biology tells us that a mother is slightly more likely to have a boy than a girl. And the further she lives from the equator, namely at a higher latitude, the likelihood that she'll have a boy goes up just a bit more. Anyway, all the additional info in the question is a distraction from the actual question of proportion of boys to girls in this country's population. There's no evidence that says a mother's body has a memory of the gender of her previous child. So the proportion of boys to girls in the population will be whatever it is per birth, since the population counts individuals, not families. The extra info does tell us how to determine the conditional probability of family size. Assuming simplified probabilities of 50% even, turns out, if a family has a kid at all, it's 50% likely they'll have one kid, 50% likely they'll have more than one kid, 25% likely they'll have more than two kids, etc. And apparently the poor lady won't stop till she gets a boy, and that may never happen, based on what the question tells us. But then, they're not asking questions related to the only partially-useful and extra information they've given, such as what's the average family size in this country? Or, how many girls does the average family in this country have? pauldeba: I believe this is an expected value / series problem. Basically, each family will keep having girls until they have a boy. At the same time, for each outcome you have a percent boys. So in outcome 1, the ratio is 100%, in , it's 50%, in it's 33%, and so on. Then just multiply the probability of the outcome by the percent boys in that outcome and sum all of those to get the expected percentage of boys in the general population. If they have a boy they stop if they have a girl they try again. In the simplest case you end up with a family having 1 boy or 1 girl and 1 boy and therefore a population of 2 boys to 1 girl. MG... |
| blog.seattleinterviewcoach.com/2009/02/140-google-interview-questions.html# AdWords Associate Google Interview Questions: Product Marketing Manager * Why do you want to join Google? Google Interview Questions: Product Manager * How would you boost the GMail subscription base? So what can you do to organize your shirts for easy retrieval? Every wife in the village instantly knows when a man other than her husband has cheated, but does not know when her own husband has. Any wife who can prove that her husband is unfaithful must kill him that very day. One day, the queen of the village visits and announces that at least one husband has been unfaithful. Unfortunately, they only have one flashlight and it only has enough light left for seventeen minutes. The bridge is too dangerous to cross without a flashlight, and it's only strong enough to support two people at any given time. One can cross the bridge in 1 minute, another in 2 minutes, the third in 5 minutes, and the slow poke takes 10 minutes to cross. your friend makes you a wager that for every person you find that has the same birthday as you, you get $1; for every person he finds that does not have the same birthday as you, he gets $2. How can you find the ball that is heavier by using a balance and only two weighings? The top pirate has the right to propose how 100 gold coins should be divided among them. But the others get to vote on his plan, and if fewer than half agree with him, he gets killed. How should he allocate the gold in order to maximize his share but live to enjoy it? Eggs can be very hard or very fragile means it may break if dropped from the first floor or may not even break if dropped from 100th floor. You need to figure out the highest floor of a 100-story building an egg can be dropped without breaking. Google Interview Questions: Software Engineer * Why are manhole covers round? Which one would you use to protect access to an increment operation? You must write a the question on a card which and give it to Eve who will take the card to Bob and return the answer to you. What must you write on the card, besides the question, to ensure Bob can encode the message so that Eve cannot read your phone number? After running it 10 times in a debugger, you find it never crashes in the same place. The application is single threaded, and uses only the C standard library. Describe how you would go about finding a good estimate of 1000 samples from this never ending set of data and then write code for it. Write BFS and DFS code, explain run time and space requirements. Modify the code to handle trees with weighted edges and loops with BFS and DFS, make the code print out path to goal state. When you reach the end of the list you will come back to the beginning of the list (a circular list). Write the most efficient algorithm to find the minimum # in this list. The numbers in the list are always increasing but you don't know where the circular list begins, ie: 38, 40, 55, 89, 6, 13, 20, 23, 36. then describe how you could make them more efficient (in terms of algorithms). Write some code that finds the sub-matrix with the maximum sum of its elements. So what can you do to organize your shirts for easy retrieval? How can you fine the ball that is heavier by using a balance and only two weighings? These are the particulars: 1) You are given 12 servers to work with. It consists of 100 Billion log lines, broken down into 12 320 GB files of 40-byte search terms per line. Solve it without division operator and in O * There is a linked list of numbers of length N N is very large and you don't know N You have to write a function that will return k random numbers from the list. Hint: 1 Use random function rand() (returns a number between 0 and 1) and irand() (return either 0 or 1) 2 It should be done in O * Find or determine non existence of a number in a sorted list of N numbers where the numbers range over M, M>> N and N large enough to span multiple disks. Algorithm to beat O(log n) bonus points for constant time algorithm. You have to write a function in which you pass the whole game and name of a player. The function will return whether the player has won the game or not. First you to decide which data structure you will use for the game. You need to tell the algorithm first and then need to write the code. So your data structure should consider this condition also. you are allowed to use only constant space and the time complexity is O No divisions are allowed. Hint :: If the node is stored at the ith position and its children are at 2i and 2i+1(I mean level order wise)Its not the most efficient way. ie sorting Binary Search Tree and storing the results in an array and listing out the fifth element. Write an in-place algorithm to rearrange the elements of the array ass A = i1 c1 i2 c2 ... in cn * Given two sequences of items, find the items whose absolute number increases or decreases the most when comparing one sequence with the other by reading the sequence only once. Windowing will result in O(N+M) solution but could it be better? How would you find those short list numbers in the bigger one? We want to push, pop, and also, retrieve the minimum element in constant time. Being equal means that they have the same value and same structure. Write an algorithm that take a list of n words, and an integer m, and retrieves the mth most frequent word in that list. Write a function which will return a random number from the list. You must write a the question on a card which and give it to Eve who will take the card to Bob and return the answer to you. What must you write on the card, besides the question, to ensure Bob can encode the message so that Eve cannot read your phone number? We say (x1, y1, z1) > (x2, y2, z2) when value(x1, y1, z1) > value(x2, y2, z2) where value(x,y,z) = (2^x)*(3^y)*(5^z). Now we can not get it by calculating value(x,y,z) or through other indirect calculations as lg(value(x,y,z)). Ie do not just go through each element searching for that element. It supports 2 functions: String get(T t) and void put(String k, T t). The object of the game is to direct a frog to avoid cars while crossing a busy road. It must allow for various items in the maze - walls, objects, and computer-controlled characters. Before there there three letters mapped to a number button. Describe how you would go about implementing spelling and word suggestions as people type. If each document contains a set of keywords, and is associated with a numeric attribute, how to build indices? eg if there exists the word "top" in the database, the query for "pot" should list that. Google Interview: Quantitative Compensation Analyst * What is the yearly standard deviation of a stock given the monthly standard deviation? Google Interview: Engineering Manager * You're the captain of a pirate ship, and your crew gets to vote on how the gold is divided up. If fewer than half of the pirates agree with you, you die. How do you recommend apportioning the gold in such a way that you get a good share of the booty, but still survive? Google Interview: AdWords Associate * How would you work with an advertiser who was not seeing the benefits of the AdWords relationship due to poor conversions? Post Comments (Atom) About Lewis Lin I have been coaching job seekers for five years, offering guidance on interview questions and answers during their job search. I earned my Masters of Business Administration from Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management and my Bachelor's in Computer Science from Stanford University. I've been working at Microsoft in various marketing, product management, and product planning roles. Prior to Microsoft, I've worked at Google, Citigroup, & Sun Microsystems. Over the last five years, I've interviewed over 150 candidates for marketing, product management, and program management positions at Google and Microsoft. |
| www.businessinsider.com/answers-to-15-google-interview-questions-that-will-make-you-feel-stupid-2009-11#youre-the-captain-of-a-pirate-ship-11 compiled by professional interview coach Lewis Lin) that made us feel dumber than usual. So we've come up with answers for each of the 15 that confused us (and thousands upon thousands of you). RTH: And that's why they need to have a distinct lip on the manhole for the manhole cover to rest on, so that the round manhole cover will be larger than the opening. If you look carefully at square or rectangular opening in the street or sidewalk, you will notice that they are nearly all hinged at the edge so that they are not removable and therefore can't fall in. For some reason, small pullboxes for things like Verizon FIOS are on of the few exceptions to these rules. Maybe it is because the Internet is different this time and gravity is not an issue. Curves of constant width, like the reuleaux triangle that is the rotor in a Wankel engine. The person climbing in is cylindrical, and the vertical cylinder is the strongest against side soil pressure (important when trusting yourself to 100 year old bricks). RTH: Manholes are round because a circle is the only shape that can't fall into itself is true and valid, also circles are consistent in dimension, there are no extremities that are vulnerable to damage from stress or impact. Really people should get experience of how things really work rather than how things look on computer models. Amazing as it may seem to some folks the so called 'information revolution/age' is dispossessing real people, one day we may end up with all our information in the cloud, and then someone decides to turn the cloud off for security reasons. Your geometric arguments are sound, but this one is meant to make you talk yourself into circles (literally) with overblown logic. It's a classic test to see how closely you're listening. Steve: Your response to their argument is also incorrect, but not by as wide a margin or as ridiculous. NOT square pipes, and as the pipe comes to the surface the contact shape at the cross section is ROUND so the cover is ROUND. and as for me, I am leaving the US because I am not a millionaire and am going to give my intellect to the Japanese or Chinese. Nicholas Carlson: Golf balls DO occupy more volume than their own when stacked. They don't fit together nicely like cubes, and no matter what you do, you will fill a space with a far lesser volume than that of the golf balls. This was just repeated on a Mythbuster's best-of featuring the cool trick of raising a sunken ship with golf balls. something %) as many golf balls to fill up a space as first calculated because there is empty space. I'm assuming the question is asking for exactly what is missed: golf balls don't stack and occupy space evenly. Doing the basic volume math gets you halfway and a wrong answer. Nicholas Carlson: This is more a programmer question than a project manager question. F, so 0xdeadbeef is the easy to remember number 3735928559 written out in hexadecimal, which fills 32 bits of data and is unlikely to show up by accident. Therefore careful programmers do things like fill random sections of memory with this number over and over again. They then scan these regions to see if it still says DEAD BEEF everywhere. If it doesn't then somewhere in code you are writing to memory it shouldn't write to, and it is time to do some debugging. DEADBEEF is a hexadecimal value that has was used in debugging back in the mainframe/assembly days because it was easy to see when marking 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. From wikipedia: "0xDEADBEEF ("dead beef") is used by IBM RS/6000 systems, Mac OS on 32-bit PowerPC processors and the Commodore Amiga as a magic debug value. On Sun Microsystems' Solaris, it marks freed kernel memory. On OpenVMS running on Alpha processors, DEAD_BEEF can be seen by pressing CTRL-T. It should be (1/2 number of stories) + 1 Think of a 100-story building as a sorted "list" of 100 floor numbers. The quickest way to find something in a sorted list is a binary search. If it was > 50 but < 75, you split the difference and try #62 next. Or if it had been < 50 but > 25, you split the difference and try #37 next. But here, you don't have that luxury to repeatedly narrow it down, as you only have 2 eggs to break. So the first egg should serve to cut the "list" of building stories in half, and the 2nd egg will be used to incrementally count upward. Keep moving up a floor and dropping an egg until it breaks, going up through floor #100 if necessary. Keep moving up a floor and dropping an egg until it breaks, going up through floor #49 if necessary. So if the egg didn't break from floor #50, you'll do a maximum of 51 drops. Obviously, we're not doing both Step #2 and #3, so our overall maximum is 51 drops. For a 100-story building it'll take a maximum of 19 drops. First you drop an egg every ten stories: floor 10, 20, 30, and so on until it breaks. In the worst-case scenario it breaks at floor 100, so that's 10 drops. Then you drop the second egg every story, starting from 10 below where it broke: floor 91, 92, 93, and so on until it breaks. In the worst-case scenario you have to drop all the way up to 99, so that's 9 more drops. Nicholas Carlson: You can do the building drop problem in 14 steps: Start at floor 14, if it doesn't break go to floor 27, if it doesn't break go to floor 39, and etc. When the egg breaks go back to the floor above the last floor that didn't break and drop the 2nd egg until it breaks. The floors to visit with the first egg are: 14, 27, 39, 50, 60, 69, 77, 84, 90, 95, and 99. Mike L: @Mike L I came up with the same answer as you did, max tests of 14, but you have to test 14, 27, 39, 50, 60, 69, 77, 84, 90, 95, 99 AND 100 - you forgot the top floor. In fact, you can do better by optimizing for the average case. A better solution is to take into consideration the number of times you've dropped the first egg so far, and adjust the gap accordingly. So instead of a spacing of 10 floors evenly, make it vary based on how many times you've dropped the first egg so far. Remember: you're optimizing for the *total* number of egg drops. So here's a solution that achieves the lower bound of 14: First egg: drop it from 14th floor. If it doesn't break, drop it again from the 27th floor (14 + 13). If it doesn't break, drop the first one again from the 39th floor (14+13+12). If you have 2 eggs, with F floors, then the minimum number of drops required, N, is the smallest N such that ( N*(N+1) >= 2*F ). The wording of the question implies that Bob will be writing his answer down and passing it back through the intermediary, Eve. Have Bob add all the digits of your phone number together, write down the total, and pass that back to you. Assuming a 10-digit number (including area code), a 2-digit checksum ought to suffice. However, it won't conclusively prove that Bob knows your phone number, as there are multiple ways to arrive at the same checksum. Now, maybe the checksum is "good enough" because it still narrows things down a lot, but maybe Bob needs to provide more info to avoid uncertainty, or multiple trips by Eve. However, I can't think of a way for Bob to give a definitive answer without tipping off Eve. Maybe the wording of the question is just a way to artificially constrain some of the respondents, while more free-thinking yet practical types will distinguish themselves by just having Bob pick up the darned phone. Assassin: how about writing down "Call Me now" on the message, that way IF your phone rings you know he has your number and if it does not you know he has the wrong number. It does not say he has to HAVE your number, you just need to know IF he has the correct number. Assassin: You are asking Bob if he has your correct number, in which case a Yes/No response answers your question. Granted, you may have changed numbers recently, but it is also plausible that you are asking if he understands which number is the correct number to call you at (eg mobile, office, home, etc). Simply put, manhole covers are round because manho... |