Are You Smart Enough to Work at Google?: Trick Questions, Zen-Like Riddles, Insanely Difficult Puzzles, and Other Devious Interviewing Techniques You ... Know to Get a Job Anywhere in the New Economy
by
William Poundstone
Published 4 Jan 2012
It’s like the candidate is an indie film: better to inspire passion in somebody than to try to please everybody. The flip side of this is that getting a single poor review isn’t so bad. The Obama Question Google’s interviewers are discouraged from asking the traditional brainteasers popular at other companies, like “Why are manhole covers round?” They’re also not supposed to test candidates’ knowledge with trivia questions like the following. ? Explain the significance of “dead beef.” Nor are they supposed to haze interviewees with cryptic demands like this one. ? There’s a latency problem in South Africa. Diagnose it.
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Five Engineers and How Not to Think Like Them The Value of Keeping Things Simple The great physicist Richard Feynman once applied for a job at Microsoft (so runs the guaranteed-apocryphal story). “Well, well, Dr. Feynman,” the interviewer began. “We don’t get many Nobel Prize winners, even at Microsoft! But before we can hire you, there’s a slight formality. We need to ask you a question to test your creative reasoning ability. The question is, why are manhole covers round?” “That’s a ridiculous question,” Feynman said. “For one thing, not all covers are round. Some are square!” “But considering just the round ones, now,” the interviewer went on, “why are they round?” “Why are round manhole covers round?! Round covers are round by definition! It’s a tautology.”
The Google Resume: How to Prepare for a Career and Land a Job at Apple, Microsoft, Google, or Any Top Tech Company
by
Gayle Laakmann Mcdowell
Published 25 Jan 2011
How to Prepare Working with Your Recruiter Communication and Behavior Special Interview Types After the Interview Your Questions Answered Additional Resources Chapter 8: Interview Questions General Advice Acing the Standard Questions Behavioral and Résumé Questions Estimation Questions Design Questions Brainteasers: Why Are Manhole Covers Round? Answering the Tough Questions Your Questions Answered Additional Resources Chapter 9: The Programming Interview How They Differ: Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Apple How to Prepare Memory Usage Coding Questions Algorithm Questions: Five Ways to Create an Algorithm Object-Oriented Design Scalability Questions Testing Interviews Example Problems Your Questions Answered Additional Resources Chapter 10: Getting into Gaming The Culture: Is It All Fun and Games?
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If you had an infinite amount of money, how would you design a bathroom? 4. Most people hate bank web sites. Design a web site for a new bank. 5. Design the heating/air-conditioning controls for a car. Assume that you’re designing from scratch: no one has ever seen a car’s air-conditioning/heating controls. Brainteasers: Why Are Manhole Covers Round? Once standard at Microsoft and many other companies, brainteasers have dropped in popularity substantially. Interviewers are instead encouraged to ask behavioral or skill-specific interview questions. Unfortunately, they still pop up from time to time, either because no one can decide exactly what a brainteaser is, or because some interviewers still feel that these questions are an effective way of measuring intelligence.
Outliers
by
Malcolm Gladwell
Published 29 May 2017
High-tech companies like Google or Microsoft carefully measure the cognitive abilities of prospective employees out of the same belief: they are convinced that those at the very top of the IQ scale have the greatest potential. (At Microsoft, famously, job applicants are asked a battery of questions designed to test their smarts, including the classic “Why are manhole covers round?” If you don't know the answer to that question, you're not smart enough to work at Microsoft.*) If I had magical powers and offered to raise your IQ by 30 points, you'd say yesrightYou'd assume that would help you get further ahead in the world. And when we hear about someone like Chris Langan, our instinctive response is the same as Terman's instinctive response when he met Henry Cowell almost a century ago.
Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries
by
Kory Stamper
Published 14 Mar 2017
That is commitment to the dictionary that goes above and beyond. Sometimes the questions are ones that we cannot possibly answer. “I remember when I was handling the earliest e-mail correspondence,” Karen said. “Someone wrote to us and asked us where to buy beans.” Some of the more notable queries I’ve received include the following: Why are manhole covers round? Do woodchucks actually chuck wood? Why is the rainbow divided into seven colors, and why we do start with red? What should you look for when purchasing an Alaskan malamute? If you sneeze with your eyes open, will your eyeballs fall out? Can dogs dive three hundred feet? Are babies natural?
Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets From Inside Amazon
by
Colin Bryar
and
Bill Carr
Published 9 Feb 2021
Infamously, he would ask the candidate for their SAT scores, even if the candidate was interviewing for a job in customer support or at the distribution center, where the score wasn’t relevant. Jeff has high academic standards and a bias for people who are similarly academically accomplished. As company lore has it, Jeff also liked to ask random quiz questions, such as “How many passengers fly through LAX in a year?” or “Why are manhole covers round?” As a result, many of the early hires at Amazon had advanced degrees from highly regarded universities and were good at devising answers to left-field questions. (There are several reasons manhole covers are round. One is that round covers can’t fall into round holes. Another is that they’re easy to roll.)
You've Been Played: How Corporations, Governments, and Schools Use Games to Control Us All
by
Adrian Hon
Published 14 Sep 2022
Big tech companies have always competed to hire the best programmers, but since there are only so many computer science graduates from MIT and Stanford to go around, they’re looking further afield than ever to find those diamonds in the rough, the self-taught geniuses who can’t be found in the usual places. But the further you look, the more work you have to do to sort candidates, which is expensive if humans have to do it. The answer? Gamified interview processes. Perhaps you’ve read about the brainteasers posed by Google interviewers like “Why are manhole covers round?” or “How would you estimate the number of cows in the United States?” Those quirky questions lie at the end of the recruitment funnel. Getting there is a surprisingly unpleasant process. Jared Nelsen, a software engineer based in Boulder, Colorado, caused a stir amongst the programming community in 2020 when he revealed what he called the “horrifically dystopian world of software engineering interviews.”93 In a blog post, Nelsen described how after typing some obscure code into Google’s search engine, the website faded to black and showed this text: You are speaking our language… Would you like to take a challenge?
The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon
by
Brad Stone
Published 14 Oct 2013
“If I’m able to join a company like yours at this early stage, I’d feel like I get to participate in something historic.” Bezos almost started yelling. “That is exactly how we think at Amazon.com! You watch. There will be a proliferation of companies in this space and most will die. There will be only a few enduring brands, and we will be one of them.” After a few moments of silence, Bezos asked, “So, why are manhole covers round?” “Jeff, if you want to get to the airport on time, you cannot ask me a question like that.” Bezos let loose a gunfire burst of laughter, startling Birtwistle, who almost veered off the highway. “No, seriously,” Bezos said. “How would you solve that problem?” “They’re round because it makes them easier to roll into place?”