Former Google eng interviewer here. We never asked the stupid brain teaser questions. I usually asked one open question, like "describe a really hard bug you f

Former Google eng interviewer here. We never asked the stupid brain teaser questions. I usually asked one open question, like "describe a really hard bug you found", and one technical question. The technical questions ranged by candidate, and the sorts of questions others had already asked (most candidates get ~5 interviewers). The technical questions usually fell into 2 categories: Algorithms/etc: These should be solvable by the average engineer, but hard to solve optimally. Questions with both brute force and dynamic programming solutions were my favorites. I had a couple of questions where there were O(N^3), O(N^2), O(N*log(N)), and O(N) answers. System design questions: How would you build ... Google News (I was the TL at one time)? Or I would give them a specific problem, often involving distributed computing. Often candidates would have to come up with alternate solutions when things like speed of light get in the way of the problem requirements. Being able to negotiate problem definition is a great skill in an engineer. Some candidates really just tried to pound the square peg into the round hole for an hour.