We have all seen the great jobs that Google has to offer, and the amazing bonuses that they hand out to outstanding employees, so let’s get a job with Google. It is easier than it sounds. Here are just ten of the off the wall questions that you might be asked. These are real questions asked of other candidates.
10.
A man pushed his car to a hotel and lost his fortune. What happened?
He landed on boardwalk.
9.
Explain the significance of "dead beef"
Whatever you do don’t tell them its because its dead, this isn’t the right answer even though it seems obvious. The truth of the matter is that dead beef is a coding term.
It includes hexadecimal values and was used in debugging programs in the older days. It is also used by IBM RS/6000 systems, Mac OS on 32-bit PowerPC processors and the Commodore Amiga as a magic debug value. On Sun Microsystems' Solaris, it marks freed kernel memory. On OpenVMS running on Alpha processors, DEAD_BEEF can be seen by pressing CTRL-T.[3]"
8.
You need to check that your friend, Bob, has your correct phone number, but you cannot ask him directly. You must write the question on a card which and give it to Eve who will take the card to Bob and return the answer to you.What must you write on the card, besides the question, to ensure Bob can encode the message so that Eve cannot read your phone number?
You are just checking to see if he has the number, so you ask him to ring your phone at a certain time. If it doesn’t ring he obviously doesn’t have your number.
7.
Explain a database in three sentences to your eight-year-old nephew.
Again this is a test of how you can communicate complex ideas in a rapid simple language so that everyone understands what you are saying. You could say: A database is a way of creating a list or set of items with information. We use these databases to help us remember information. Now go play.
6.
How many times a day does a clock’s hands overlap?
22 times, of course if you tell them it’s a digital clock the answer is zero.
5.
Design an evacuation plan for San Francisco.
This is another question where they are looking to see how you would handle a problem that might come up in your work. A good way to answer this question is to ask them what type of disaster are we planning for?
4.
How many piano tuners are there in the entire world?
The fast answer would be as many as it takes. The longer answer could be something relative to if a tuner works a certain number of hours per day say 7 then he works 5 days a week 35 pianos are being tuned each week, so that would be one per piano.
3.
How much should you charge to wash all the windows in Seattle?
The way to answer this question is to come up with an easier solution to the problem. IE: We'd say. "$15 per window."
2.
How many golf balls can fit in a school bus?
This is one of those questions Google asks just to see if the applicant can explain the key challenge to solving the problem.
One smart reader came up with this response:
A standard school bus is about 8ft wide by 6ft high by 20 feet long - this is just a guess based on the thousands of hours I have been trapped behind school buses while traffic in all directions is stopped. That means 960 cubic feet and since there are 1728 cubic inches in a cubit foot, that means about 1.6 million cubic inches. I calculate the volume of a golf ball to be about 2.5 cubic inches (4/3 * pi * .85) as .85 inches is the radius of a golf ball. Divide that 2.5 cubic inches into 1.6 million and you come up with 660,000 golf balls. However, since there are seats and crap in there taking up space and also since the spherical shape of a golf ball means there will be considerable empty space between them when stacked, I'll round down to 500,000 golf balls. Which sounds ludicrous. I would have spitballed no more than 100k. But I stand by my math. Of course, if we are talking about the kind of bus that George Bush went to school on or Barney Frank rides to work every day, it would be half that....or 250,000 golf balls.
1.
You are given 2 eggs. You have access to a 100-story building. Eggs can be very hard or very fragile means it may break if dropped from the first floor or may not even break if dropped from 100th floor. Both eggs are identical. You need to figure out the highest floor of a 100-story building an egg can be dropped without breaking. The question is how many drops you need to make. You are allowed to break 2 eggs in the process.
The maximum egg drops for this method is 14 times. Instead of partitioning the floors by 10, Start at the 14th floor, and then go up 13 floors, then 12, then 11, then 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4 until you get to the 99th floor, then here. If the egg were to break at the 100th floor, it would take 12 drops (or 11 if you assume that it would break at the 100th floor). Say, for example, that the 49th floor was the highest floor, the number of drops would be the 14th, 27th, 39th, 50th (the egg would break on the 50th floor) plus the 40, 41,42,43,44,45,46,47,48, and 49th floor for a total of 14 drops.
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