I've interviewed at Google a few times. They don't ask the fizzbuzz test. Actually I was totally stymied. I regard it as poor form to post the questions I've

I've interviewed at Google a few times. They don't ask the fizzbuzz test. Actually I was totally stymied. I regard it as poor form to post the questions I've been asked online. However I could describe them reasonably by saying that I was asked to design algorithms that would efficiently perform some computational task, with a very large input set, given a distributed system with a specific number of computers, disk drives and ethernet cards. By the time one is actually called in for an onsite at google, one has been through at least two, maybe three phone interviews. During one such interview, I was asked by Google's engineer what actually happened after the user clicked a certain button in a popular GUI program. I went on for twenty solid minutes - "Well there's a system call, which is typically implemented by calling some manner of illegal instruction, so there's a trap into the exception handling mechanism. The registers are saved on the stack, the CPU sets a flag to indicate that it is in supervisor mode, then a table is consulted to find the address of the function that actually implements the system call..." and then I went on about what happens in the kernel. Someone who didn't know how computers actually worked might say "When you click that button, the program saves your document."