Are You Smart Enough to Work at Google?

Fiendish Interview Questions and Puzzles from the World's Top Companies

William Poundstone

• Publisher: Oneworld Publications
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781780740751
• Subtopic: Business General

The No.1 bestseller new in paperback!

Pit your brains against the taxing riddles used by the world's best companies to select their staff

THE INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER

'Subtle and sophisticated... you will love this book.' Observer

You are shrunk to the height of a penny and thrown in a blender. The blades start moving in sixty seconds. What do you do? If you want to work at Google, or any of the world’s top employers, you’ll need to have a convincing answer to this and countless other baffling puzzles.

Are You Smart Enough to Work at Google? Reveals the new extreme interview questions in the hypercompetitive job-market and uncovers the extraordinary lengths to which the best companies will go to find the right staff. Bestselling author William Poundstone guides readers through the surprising solutions to over a hundred of the most challenging conundrums used in interviews, as well as covering the importance of creative thinking, what your Facebook page says about you, and what really goes on inside the Googleplex. How will you fare?

One

Outnumbered at the Googleplex

What It Takes to Get Hired at a Hyperselective Company

Jim was sitting in the lobby of Google’s Building 44, Mountain View, California, surrounded by half a dozen others in various states of stupor. All were staring dumbly at the stupidest, most addictive TV show ever. It is Google’s live search board, the ever-scrolling list of the search terms people are Googling at this very instant. Watching the board is like picking the lock to the world’s diary, then wishing you hadn’t. For one moment, the private desires and anxieties of someone in New Orleans or Hyderabad or Edinburgh are broadcast to a select audience of voyeurs in Google lobbies—most of them twenty- and thirty-year-olds awaiting a job interview.

giant-print Bibles

overseeding

Tales of Phantasia

world’s largest glacier

JavaScript

man makeup

purpose of education

Russian laws relating to archery

Jim knew the odds were stacked against him. Google was receiving a million job applications a year. It was estimated that only about 1 in 130 applications resulted in a job. By comparison, about 1 in 14 students applying to Harvard University gets accepted. As at Harvard, Google employees must overcome some tall hurdles.

Jim’s first interviewer was late and sweaty: he had biked to work. He started with some polite questions about Jim’s work history. Jim eagerly explained his short career. The interviewer didn’t look at him. He was tapping away at his laptop, taking notes.

“The next question I’m going to ask,” he said, “is a little unusual.

?	You are shrunk to the height of a penny and thrown into a blender. Your mass is reduced so that your density is the same as usual. The blades start moving in sixty seconds. What do you do?”^1

The interviewer had looked up from his laptop and was grinning like a maniac with a new toy.

“I would take the change in my pocket and throw it into the blender motor to jam it,” Jim said.

The interviewer’s tapping resumed. “The inside of a blender is sealed,” he countered, with the air of someone who had heard it all before. “If you could throw pocket change into the mechanism, then your smoothie would leak into it.”

“Right . . . um . . . I would take off my belt and shirt, then. I’d tear the shirt into strips to make a rope, with the belt, too, maybe. Then I’d tie my shoes to the end of the rope and use it like a lasso. . . .”

Furious key clicks.

“I don’t mean a lasso,” Jim plowed on. “What are those things Argentinean cowboys throw? It’s like a weight at the end of a rope.”

No answer. Jim now felt his idea was lame, yet he was compelled to complete it. “I’d throw the weights over the top of the blender jar. Then I’d climb out.”

“The ‘weights’ are just your shoes,” the interviewer said. “How would they support your body’s weight? You weigh more than your shoes do.”

Jim didn’t know. That wasn’t the end of it. The interviewer had suddenly warmed to the topic. He began ticking off quibbles one by one. He wasn’t sure whether Jim’s shirt—shrunken with the rest of him—could be made into a rope that would be long enough to reach over the lip of a blender. Once Jim got to the top of the jar—if he got there—how would he get down again? Could he realistically make a rope in sixty seconds?

Jim didn’t see where a word like realistic came into play. It was as if Google had a shrinking ray and was planning to try it out next week.

“It was nice meeting you,” the interviewer said, extending a still-damp hand.

We live in an age of desperation. Never in living memory has the competition for job openings been more intense. Never have job interviews been tougher. This is the bitter fruit of the jobless recovery and the changing nature of work.

For some job seekers, Google is the shining city on the hill. It’s where the smartest people do the coolest things. In the U.S., Google regularly ranks at or near the top of Fortune magazine’s list of “100 Best Companies to Work For.” The Google Mountain View campus (the “Googleplex”) is a cornucopia of amenities for its presumably lucky employees. There are eleven gourmet restaurants serving free, organic, locally grown food; climbing walls and pools for swimming in place; mural-size whiteboards for sharing spontaneous thoughts; Ping-Pong, table football, and air-hockey tables; cutesy touches like red phone booths and topiary dinosaurs. Google employees have access to coin-free laundry machines, free flu shots, foreign language lessons, car washes, and oil changes. There is shuttle service between home and work; $5,000 rebates for buying a hybrid; communal scooters for anyone’s use on campus. New parents get $500 for takeaway meals and eighteen weeks’ leave to bond with their infant. Google pays the income tax on health benefits for same-sex domestic partners. All employees get an annual ski trip. The perks aren’t necessarily about generosity, and unlike the workplace gains of previous generations, they haven’t been negotiated by unions or individuals. It’s good business for Google to offer such benefits in an industry so dependent on attracting the top talent. The benefits not only keep employees happy but also keep everyone else with their noses pressed against the glass.

Google is not so exceptional as you might think. Today’s army of unemployed has made every company a Google. Unsexy firms now find themselves with multiple well-qualified applicants for each position. That is very good for the companies that are able to hire. Like Google, they get to cherry-pick the top talent in their fields. It’s not so good for the applicants. They are confronting harder, ruder, more invasive vetting than ever before.

This is most evident in the interviews. There are, of course, many types of questions traditionally asked in job interviews. These include the “behavioral” questions that have almost become clichés:

“Tell me about a situation where you just couldn’t get along with a team member.”

“Describe a time when you had to deal with a rude customer.”

“What is your biggest failure in life?”

“Did you ever find yourself unable to meet a deadline? What did you do?”

“Describe the most diverse team you ever managed.”

There are questions relating to business:

“How would you describe Holland & Barrett to a person visiting from another country?”

“Tell me how Waitrose competes with Tesco, and how we should reposition our brand to gain market share.”

“How would you get more customers for Halifax Bank?”

“What challenges will Starbucks face in the next ten years?”

“How would you monetize Facebook?”

Then there’s work sampling. Rather than asking job candidates what they can do, companies expect them to demonstrate it within the interview. Sales managers have to devise a marketing plan. Attorneys draft a contract. Software engineers write code.

Finally, there are open-ended mental challenges—something for which Google is particularly known. Questions like “thrown into a blender” are an attempt to measure mental flexibility and even entrepreneurial potential. That’s been important at Google because of the company’s fast growth. A person hired for one job may be doing something else in a few years. Work sampling, while valuable, tests only a particular set of skills. The more offbeat questions attempt to gauge something that every company wants but few know how to measure: the ability to innovate.

For that reason, many of Google’s interview questions have spread to companies far beyond Mountain View. Google’s “brand” is now estimated to be the most valuable in the world, worth $86 billion, according to Millward Brown Optimor. Success breeds imitation. Corporate types vow to “be more like Google” (whatever that means for the kitchen flooring industry). Not surprisingly, that includes hiring.

What Number Comes Next?

The style of interviewing at Google is indebted to an older tradition of using logic puzzles to test job candidates at technology companies. Consider this one. The interviewer writes six numbers on the room’s whiteboard:

The question is, what number comes next in the series?

Similar riddles have been used on psychological tests of creativity. Most of the time, the job applicant stumbles around, gamely trying to make sense of a series that gives every indication of being completely senseless. The majority of candidates give up. A lucky few have a flash of insight.

Forget maths. Spell out the numbers in plain English, which gives you the following:

ten

nine

sixty

ninety

seventy

sixty-six

The numbers are in order of how many letters are in their names!

Now look more closely. Ten is not the only number you can spell with three letters. There’s also one, two, and six. Nine is not the only four-letter number; there’s zero, four, and five. This is a list of the largest numbers that can be spelled in a given number of letters.

Now for the payoff, what number comes next? Whatever number follows sixty-six should have nine letters in it (not counting a possible hyphen) and should be the largest nine-letter number. Play around with it, and you’ll probably come up with ninety-six. It doesn’t look like you can get anything above 100 because that would start “one hundred,” requiring ten letters and up.

You might wonder why the list doesn’t have 100 (“hundred”) in place of 70 (“seventy”). “Million” and “billion” have seven letters, too. A reasonable guess is they’re using cardinal numbers spelled in correct stylebook English. The way you write out the number 100 is “one hundred.”

In the On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences, you can type in a series of numbers and it tells you what numbers come next. You’re not allowed to use it with this interview question, of course, but the website’s answer for this sequence is 96. In recent years, companies in all sorts of industries have adopted this question for interviews. Often the interviewer throws it in just to make the poor candidate squirm. At many of these companies, the one and only correct answer is 96.

Not at Google. In Mountain View, 96 is considered to be an acceptable answer. A better response is

10­,­000­,­000­,­000­,­000­,­000­,­000­,­000­,­000­,­000­,­000­,­000­,­000­,­000­,­000­,­000­,­000­,­000­,­000­,­000­,­000­,­000­,­000­,­000­,­000­,­000­,­000­,­000­,­000­,­000­,­000­,­000­,­000­,­000

A.k.a. “one googol.”

That’s not the best answer, though. The preferred response is

100­,­000­,­000­,­000­,­000­,­000­,­000­,­000­,­000­,­000­,­000­,­000­,­000­,­000­,­000­,­000­,­000­,­000­,­000­,­000­,­000­,­000­,­000­,­000­,­000­,­000­,­000­,­000­,­000­,­000­,­000­,­000­,­000­,­000

Ten googol.

That response can be traced back to 1938 or thereabouts. Nine-year-old Milton Sirotta and his brother Edwin were taking a stroll one day with their uncle in the New Jersey Palisades. The uncle was Edward Kasner, a Columbia University mathematician already somewhat famous as the first Jew to gain tenure in the sciences at that Ivy League institution. Kasner entertained the boys by talking about a topic calculated to appeal to bookish nine-year-olds, namely the number that could be written as a “1” followed by a hundred zeros. Kasner challenged his nephews to invent a name for the number. Milton’s suggestion was “googol.”

That word appeared in the 1940 book that Kasner wrote with James Newman, Mathematics and the Imagination. So did the name for an even bigger number, the “googolplex,” defined as 10 raised to the power of a googol. Both words caught on and have permeated pop culture, turning up on The Simpsons—and as the name for the search engine devised by Larry Page and Sergey Brin. According to Stanford’s David Koller,

Sean [Anderson] and Larry [Page] were in their office, using the whiteboard, trying to think up a good name—something that related to the indexing of an immense amount of data. Sean verbally suggested the word “googolplex,” and Larry responded verbally with the shortened form, “googol” (both words refer to specific large numbers). Sean was seated at his computer terminal, so he executed a search of the Internet domain name registry database to see if the newly suggested name was still available for registration and use. Sean is not an infallible speller, and he made the mistake of searching for the name spelled as “google.com,” which he found to be available. Larry liked the name, and within hours he took the step of registering the name “google.com” for himself and Sergey.

Edward Kasner die...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication page
• Epigraph page
• Contents
• 1. Outnumbered at the Googleplex
• 2. The Cult of Creativity
• 3. Punked and Outweirded
• 4. Google’s Hiring Machine
• 5. Engineers and How Not to Think Like Them
• 6. A Field Guide to Devious Interview Questions
• 7. Whiteboarding
• 8. Dr. Fermi and the Extraterrestrials
• 9. The Unbreakable Egg
• 10. Weighing Your Head
• Answers
• Acknowledgments
• Websites and Videos
• Notes
• Bibliography
• About the Author
• Index