Some bit-twiddling questions are a fair game to ask even for folks who haven't done low-level C and C++. Asking esoterica from Hacker's Delight (an excellent bo

Some bit-twiddling questions are a fair game to ask even for folks who haven't done low-level C and C++. Asking esoterica from Hacker's Delight (an excellent book, by the way, but in no way a source of interview questions), is not, but I doubt Google does this. Bitwise operators are just as available in Java. I've done bit-twiddling in production Java code, it's something you need to do if you ever, e.g., work on a serialization library. Understand, words, bits, bytes, and bitwise operators (big part of How Computers Work (TM)(R)) is something worth knowing (and not just to pass an interview).