Google Interview Questions

kSquared · 2011-05-19T23:10:14

[edit]: If you're coming here from digg, I've posted a comment in the comments section to clarify a few points. Also, note that this thread is over a year old! I had a phone interview with Google today. I took notes; some of the questions they asked were interesting. We were allowed to ask questions. The interviewer didn't ask many questions in response to my answers, except to occasionally say "interesting". There's almost certainly more than one answer to each of these, and a few are probably wrong answers or could be improved in some way; I only include my answers for comparison. Any intermediate questions that I asked for clarification or otherwise have been omitted. Without further ado, a few of the more interesting ones: Q: "You are shrunk to the height of a nickel and your mass is proportionally reduced so as to maintain your original density. You are then thrown into an empty glass blender. The blades will start moving in 60 seconds. What do you do?" (my answer): Take off all my clothes, wedge them between the blades and the floor to prevent it from turning. Back up against the edge of the blender until the electric motor overheats and burns out. Using the notches etched in the side for measuring, climb out. If there are no such notches or they're too far apart, retrieve clothes and make a rope to hurl myself out. Q: "How would you find out if a machine's stack grows up or down in memory?" (my answer): Instantiate a local variable. Call another function with a local. Look at the address of that function and then compare. If the function's local is higher, the stack grows away from address location 0; if the function's local is lower, the stack grows towards address location 0. (If they're the same, you did something wrong!) Q: "Explain a database in three sentences to your eight-year-old nephew." (my answer): A database is a way of organizing information. It's like a genie who knows where every toy in your room is. Instead of hunting for certain toys yourself and searching the whole room, you can ask the genie to find all your toy soldiers, or only X-Men action figures, or only race cars -- anything you want. Q: "How many gas stations would you say there are in the United States?" (my answer): A business doesn't stick around for long unless it makes a profit. Let's assume that all gas stations in the US are making at least some profit over the long run. Assume that the number of people who own more than one car is negligibly small relative to the total American population. Figure that 20% of people are too young to drive a car, another 10% can't drive because of disability or old age, 5% of people use public transportation or carpool, another 5% choose not to drive, and another 5% of the cars are inventory sitting in lots or warehouses that a dealership owns but which no one drives. There's about 280 million people in the US; subtracting 50%, that means there's about 140 million automobiles and 140 million drivers for them. The busiest city or interstate gas stations probably get a customer pulling in about twice a minute, or about 120 customers per hour; a slower gas station out in an agrarian area probably sees a customer once every 10 or 15 minutes, or about 4 customers per hour. Let's take a weighted average and suppose there's about one customer every 90 seconds, or about 40 customers an hour. Figuring a fourteen-hour business day (staying open from 7 AM to 9 PM), that's about 560 customers a day. If the average gas station services 560 customers a day, then there are 250,000 gas stations in the US. This number slightly overstates the true number of gas stations because some people are serviced by more than one gas station. [Actual number in 2003, according to the Journal of Petroleum Marketing: 237,284, an error of about 5%.] P.S. Apparently, if you make it to the next stage, you can't even tell people you're interviewing, because you sign a 6-page NDA. I haven't had to sign anything yet, though. edit: Obvious spelling mistake. tall --> tell. [Edited by - kSquared on March 5, 2006 11:48:43 PM]

GDNet Lounge Community

Started by kSquared February 08, 2005 05:19 PM

79 comments, last by way2lazy2care 12 years, 11 months ago

patricholier

May 19, 2011 03:48 PM

Hi,

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Best regards.

Antheus

2,410

May 19, 2011 10:51 PM

[quote name='Antheus' timestamp='1301427890' post='4791860']
Binary search has worst-case O(logn).
Finding split point is O(n), so finding the point of rotation is several times more expensive than search itself.

Since array is sorted, recursive split can be used to determine which half is out of order. Predicates for binary search are: left < mid < right (equalities optional)

Oooo. I like that. I didn't realize it before.
[/quote]

And in my crusade against spambots, I accidentally downvoted this post. And apparently I cannot undo it. So someone upvote it.

way2lazy2care

793

May 19, 2011 11:10 PM

And in my crusade against spambots, I accidentally downvoted this post. And apparently I cannot undo it. So someone upvote it.

I thought we were friends :'(

Google Interview Questions

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Google Interview Questions

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