Are You Smart Enough to Work at Google?
Fiendish Puzzles and
Impossible Interview Questions
from the World’s Top Companies William Poundstone
A Oneworld Book
First published in the United Kingdom and Commonwealth
by Oneworld Publications 2012
Copyright © William Poundstone 2012
Originally published in the United States of America by Little, Brown and Company, a division of the Hachette Book Group, Inc., New York.
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The hourglass photograph (p. 149) is by S. Sepp, 2007, and is ud under a Creative Commons A ttribution- S hare Alike 2.5 Generic Licen.
ISBN 978-1-85168-917-0
ebook ISBN: 978-1-78074-075-1
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Contents
1. Outnumbered at the Googleplex
What It Takes to Get Hired at a Hyperlective Company3
2. The Cult of Creativity
A History of Human Resources, or Why Interviewers
Go Rogue21 3. Punked and Outweirded
How the Great Recession Mainstreamed Bizarre
Interview Questions42 4. Google’s Hiring Machineu盘读写速度
How They Pick the One to Hire out of the 130 Who Apply51 5. Engineers and How Not to Think Like Them
The Value of Keeping Things Simple68 6. A Field Guide to Devious Interview Questions
Decoding the Interviewer’s Hidden Agendas80 7. Whiteboarding
The Art of the Visual Solution97
Contents
8. Dr. Fermi and the Extraterrestrials
How to Estimate Just About Anything in
Sixty Seconds or Less106 9. The Unbreakable Egg
Questions That Ask “How Would You . . . ?”114 10. Weighing Your Head
What to Do When You Draw a Blank125
Answers137
过期牛奶的用途Acknowledgments257扎染用什么颜料
Websites and Videos259
Notes261
Bibliography271
Index277
x
One
Outnumbered at the Googleplex
What It Takes to Get Hired at a
有机护肤Hyperlective Company
J im 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 arch board, the e ver- s crolling list of the arch terms people are G
oogling 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 lect audience of voyeurs in Google l obbies — m ost of them t wenty- and t hirty- y ear- o lds awaiting a job interview.
g iant- p rint Bibles海棠花寓意
overeding
Tales of Phantasia
world’s largest glacier
JavaScript
man makeup
purpo of education
Russian laws relating to archery
Are You Smart Enough to Work at Google?
4Jim knew the odds were stacked against him. G oogle 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.
手动挡车
Jim’s first interviewer was late and sweaty: he had biked to work. He started with some polite questions about Jim’s work his-tory. 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 conds. What do you do?”*
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 aled,” 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 . . . u m . . . 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 u it like a lasso. . . .”
* Whenever you e the ? symbol in this book, it means there’s a discussion in the answer ction, starting on p. 137.
