6 ms·

“How many ants are there in the world?” -Google Interviewer I think Google has now mostly stopped with the brain teaser questions but I could absolutely imagin

• jmyeet 4y ago
  I never saw any evidence that Google ever did this, at least at scale. This was, I believe, a Microsoft interview practice. Questions such as "how many golf balls can you fit in a bus?" and "how many piano tuners are in Chicago?" Google engineering interviewing doesn't work this way and I don't think it ever did.
  • ASalazarMX 4y ago
    These useless riddles were intended to show problem solving. Even if you didn't know obscure trivia about piano tuning, New York, or buses, you could pass if you answered good enough. And that's how the Windows Update team was selected /s
    • raldi 4y ago
      Yeah, it’s the same reasoning as, “How much disk space would we need to make a Gmail clone with 100 million users?”
    • drivers99 4y ago
      Sounds like what they are looking for is if one knows about Fermi estimation. Here's a (somewhat annoying) short video about it using an example, with a timestamp to skip the intro. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YzvupOX8Is&t=89s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YzvupOX8Is&t=89s
      • ASalazarMX 4y ago
        Precisely. I believe some departments would benefit from being proficient at this, but every developer? Most are not system architects. BTW, the "See also" section in Wikipedia is funny, it even includes the spherical cow concept: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_problem#See_also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_problem#See_also
  • daniel-cussen 4y ago
    Yeah that was Microsoft. Also Edison, General Electric early on (like lightbulb era), had (according to one source, but it makes sense) like a prototype of an IQ test, tested memory and general knowledge. Basically how much you had read. By that point America had ample libraries thanks to Carnegie, so it was fair, before that there was no way. Makes sense since Edison and Gates dropped out. And back then college dropouts were too educated, so for instance JP Morgan did a year in college, traveled a bit and that completed his education. I dropped out recently (technically an impasse, glitch meant I couldn't enroll again) and with that my education is complete. But back then? Dude nobody finished high school, Ford didn't, Wright Brothers said eh, like back then if you went to college you were badly overeducated. So the "how many piano tuners are there in Chicago" question is a sanitized version of "how many kilotons of TNT did this nuclear bomb yield?". Fermi problem, I think it's called, and Fermi was great at it, got it to within a factor of 2. Wright Brothers also nailed it very well, like got 1% margins on admittedly easier math than the bomb, but with their other invention, the wind tunnel, and very very low resources initially. So the piano tuners sounds like a stupid question, otherwise it would require that special nuke clearance, get real. And it's the same thought process.
• googlryas 4y ago
  That's when I interviewed and it wasn't anything like that. Just straight up algos and data structures. I believe those came out of microsoft interview questions from the 90s? Or at least that's how they were referred to, maybe it was just a meme.
• onionisafruit 4y ago
  Somewhere there is a pissed off engineer who said 4 quadrillion in their interview only to be told their answer is implausible.
• tboyd47 4y ago
  Just link it to climate change and you can get free money to solve it now.