11 ms·

Please don't propagate the myth that Google asks prospective programmers questions like, "How many golf balls could you fit on a bus?" Google interviewers list

• potatolicious 14y ago
  Google was well known for logic brain teasers like that in years past - there was a time when Google recruitment was defined by such questions. They've since stopped, and sadly it looks like Microsoft has taken up the mantle for stupid irrelevant logic questions.
  • roc 14y ago
    retaken, perhaps.
    • mcguire 14y ago
      True. Microsoft has been famous for those for decades.
  • papsosouid 14y ago
    Were they well known for it because they did it, or because people assumed they did it? An awful lot of people immediately jump to "stupid brain teasers" when hearing "they ask technical questions". I have people write code and solve actual problems during interviews, and have gotten several "these kinds of riddles are a waste of time" responses from people who are offended by the notion that I want them to be competent.
    • potatolicious 14y ago
      From my limited anecdotes of the time, I believe Google actually did it. We're not talking about programming-related brain teasers here, we're talking about non-programming ones. e.g., "3 light bulbs in a room" and "family crossing the bridge" being the classic examples.
      • papsosouid 14y ago
        I've heard the same thing, always from unreliable "I heard" sources. I've never heard anyone who actually did interviews or was interviewed say that.
        • coliveira 14y ago
          I was interviewed by Google and had to answer this "brain teaser" kind of questions. So, no, it is not just folklore.
          • papsosouid 14y ago
            Can you be specific with some examples? As demonstrated elsewhere in the thread, some people perceive the same questions as appropriate and others perceive them as "brain teasers".
      • debacle 14y ago
        Never heard the family crossing the bridge one. Which one is that?
        • potatolicious 14y ago
          You have a bridge that can only take a certain amount of weight at once without collapsing. It's dark at night and you have only one flashlight. A flashlight is required to cross the bridge, which is traversable in both directions. You have a family of people of varying weights (the exact numbers you'd have to look up) - determine the optimal way for the family to make it across the bridge.
          • debacle 14y ago
            Thanks. I don't think that's a bad one. In fact, like the Towers of Hanoi, I think it has enough parallels with computer science and engineering to be a good interview question.
    • deleted 14y ago
      [deleted]
  • stonemetal 14y ago
    I had an MS interview a few weeks ago and it contained no irrelevant logic questions. Sure it involved moronic things like regurgitating Moore's voting algorithm and atoi but it at least involved code.
  • rattus 14y ago
    Many others have read the published books and incorporated the same in their processes. I had a series of interviews that was all logic questions with a trick that you had to decode to successfully answer it. It's cute, and everyone gets to feel really proud of themselves if they can solve an applied prisoners dilemma for the answer everyone in the room is looking for, but it's not relevant to the performance of any position that I was being considered. I'm involved in a lot of interviews and I think the problem is getting worse. Taking all of your questions from a certification exam, constructing a bubble sort, or talking about why manhole covers are circles might be satisfying to a bad interviewer, but does no one a service IMHO. I'd suggest diving deep into past work experience and ask them to show you something that they have done well so that you can understand the utility that they provide. Very few people that I encounter do this and then try to pound round pegs into square holes.
  • jspaur 14y ago
    I've spent some time at MSFT (including a transfer) and know a few recent hires across the lake and NONE of them (including myself) have had any of these sort of questions. A few data structures and algorithms type questions, but never the 'how many pennies fit in this room' type stuff that they're supposedly so famous for.
• redwood 14y ago
  Why would that even be a bad question to ask?
  • theevocater 14y ago
    Because they've been shown time and time again to tell you if someone is good at answering brain teasers rather than if someone is good at being a programmer/engineer/whatever.
    • gfodor 14y ago
      *citation needed
  • pwthornton 14y ago
    Because they're not real logic questions and they don't predict anything. It's about the same as judging someone's programming/design/writing/etc. ability by making them do crossword puzzles or Sudoku. The LSAT is filled with logic games, and they are nothing like a silly question like, "how many golf balls could you fit on a bus." They are actual logic questions that have a definitive answer that tests your reasoning abilities. Being good at brain teasers does not make you intelligent; it makes you good at brain teasers. And they don't help prevent Alzheimer's, so they're really just a way for board people to pass time.
    • DanBC 14y ago
      > a silly question like, "how many golf balls could you fit on a bus." Why is it a silly question?
      • rayiner 14y ago
        Because it makes all sorts of assumptions that are outside the scope of what you really want to test. First, it assumes familiarity with golf balls. I have friends who grew up in Manhattan who have never seen a golf ball. They may have seen one on TV, but that doesn't let you really gauge the size of something. Second, it assumes familiarity with buses, and assumes the interviewer and the interviewee are talking about the same kind of bus. Are we talking about a school bus or a big-city reticulated bus? Third, it tests skills you're not testing. I live in the city and take the bus all the time, and I don't know whether a bus is 20 feet long or 70 feet long. I'm not good at visually estimating measurements. That might be a skill relevant to a carpenter, but not so much to a programmer. Even if you assume you have the measurements, then you also have to visualize the packing structure of the golf balls. This also tests spatial skills, which are arguably not highly relevant to a programmer. Brain teasers are generally stupid because they are under formalized. I agree with the poster above. If you want to test logical skills, give someone a section of the logical reasoning section of the LSAT. Those questions were carefully designed to test logical reasoning and to avoid testing other things.
• rachelbythebay 14y ago
  What's actually in the post: "If you are a Google recruiter, and you want me to interview for SWE or SRE or any role that has an algorithm pop quiz as part of the interview, [...]" I was asked about algorithms for my internal reinterview to transfer from SRE (O ladder) to SWE (T ladder) in 2010. It was the usual sorting algorithm complexity stuff. That's never been my strong suit, and I'm sure I disappointed the interviewer. I sure felt like crap afterwards. On the other hand, the second interviewer engaged me in practical matters like designing a class which would do some things, and would be thread-safe, and how I'd rig it. Also there was the question of what you could do without a mutex for whatever reason, and when you needed to suck it up and burn the CPU time on it. Then we got into the actual design of a class like Mutex and the helper MutexLock wrapper normally used with it in the depot, and so on, and so forth. I imagine the responses from that individual helped balance out the algorithm drilling I got the day before. Where are you seeing the "golf balls" question in this post? What you said is true, that it's a crap question, and asking it would probably draw attention to you, but why did you even bring it up? It's like you're blaming the writer for propagating something when it hasn't even been mentioned.
  • dlo 14y ago
    She links to to an article that propagates said myth. Click on "arbitrary technical puzzles".
    • rachelbythebay 14y ago
      Okay, there it is. That makes a little more sense. Thank you!
  • tedivm 14y ago
    What do you mean by "O Ladder" and "T Ladder"?
    • rachelbythebay 14y ago
      Those were (are?) the designations for certain types of jobs over there. You might think that if you're hired into the company, your possibilities are wide open, but they aren't. System administrator flavored SREs (site reliability engineers) could only get other SA-flavored jobs, of which there are relatively few. Meanwhile, software engineer (SWE) type SREs could go into any other SWE job, of which there are many. If you were hired on as a SA-SRE as I was, then you have to do an internal interview to get to be a SWE-SRE. If you can't make it through that, you're stuck. I made it, and a friend did too, but I know people who didn't. I'm sure that makes them feel great, especially if they're already doing SWE type work in their daily jobs. I was told repeatedly there was no difference between the types, but found out the hard way when it was time to transfer from a toxic situation and there were few alternatives. It took over a year to finally get it all sorted out.
• sbisker 14y ago
  Funny, I was asked that exact question at Google. Granted, it was ping pong balls, and it was an airplane, but same thing. It was also 2005, for an APM position, coming straight out of college. Truthfully, for a kid coming straight out of college, that's not such a terrible question to ask. (No, I didn't get the job. :P) It allows you to start from a totally neutral knowledge position, and lets you see how a person thinks critically about an unorthodox problem - one they almost certainly haven't seen before. The problem comes when kids start training for such problems, instead of just tackling the sorts of interesting challenges that would inadvertently cause them to approach this question well...