My Nightmare Interviews With Google

http://www.businessinsider.com/my-nightmare-interviews-with-google-2009-11

by Hunchr • 17 years ago

103 136 17 years ago

jmount2• 17 years ago

"Everyone says your GPA doesn’t matter when you’re finding a job." Uh, maybe for a second job- but when you are still a senior in school your GPA is one (admittedly crude) measure of how well you were doing at your last occupation (student).

chris100• 17 years ago

As a hiring manager, I'll take internship or side-project coding experience over GPA anyday.

Sure, a good GPA is good. But if you back it up with experience, you are ahead.

jmount2• 17 years ago

I agree, and am not trying to make fun of the original author. The hiring company is going to look at the most relevant experience you have- and in some cases it is going to be GPA.

gaius• 17 years ago

At any large company HR will have designated a minimum GPA merely as a mechanism to manage the volume of incoming CVs.

nostrademons4• 17 years ago

Most of the applicants that Google accepts have side projects and internship experience and a good GPA.

gcheong• 17 years ago

I think it can certainly help if you have a good one - I certainly would have pointed it out had it been true in my case - but if it had been the decisive factor I would not have gotten the jobs I did. Just my anecdotal experience.

jazzychad3• 17 years ago

These were just questions for a position as Associate Product Marketing Manager. During my senior-year interviews with Google for a Software Engineer position, there were 3 rounds, each getting increasingly harder, chock full of nothing but technical questions: some trivia (name all standard network port associations), some implementation (design a chat server), some theory (what is the big-O runtime advantage of doubling an array size upon copy over just adding new entries linearly), etc, etc...

Each time they said "this interview will take about 30 minutes," but each one ended up being around 1.5 hours.

It was grueling, but fun. I'm not sure what happened because I didn't hear back after the 3rd interview. It was at least a nice feeling to know that all of my classes in school had helped me with the answers.

cdibona3• 17 years ago

Have you considered interviewing again (I'm assuming some time has passed)? I think its usually a pretty good sign when interviews go long. I think it might be worth your time. Feel free to email me if you'd like.

jazzychad3• 17 years ago

I have actually been contacted twice since then by Google for subsequent openings (once in the past couple of weeks!). I am currently working on my startup, but I will certainly keep this option open in the future.

jlees• 17 years ago

I wouldn't really say nightmare per se, although it probably felt like that at the time. She just wasn't very practiced at estimating and making reasonable assumptions.

Back when I was in my final year of uni I interviewed for a set of blue-chip graduate recruiters who threw similar questions at me. I distinctly remember sitting in a Data Connection office somewhere trying to work out how many petrol stations were in the UK. I was terrible. But there are ways to get better at this and it's really no secret that Google asks these kinds of questions. I think they reveal two things about the candidate - how good they are instinctively, and how well they prepare.

Obviously Google asks candidates who get past a certain point to sign a NDA, but there's still a surprising amount of information out there. I was recently helping a friend (and have previously helped an ex) with interviews and preparing for the logic and theoretical comp.sci. parts was actually quite a lot of fun. Maybe because I didn't have the pressure!

Shana7• 17 years ago

Correct. I'm here age, and for those of us who have to reteach themselves all sorts of math for a variety of reasons, BAck of the envelop questions are frightening under pressure. First thing you should do is take off the pressure and see if you can be collaborative with the person.b People tend to panic very easily.

presidentender2• 17 years ago

Her last answer really did her in, I think. She said she was "wishing [the number of graduating seniors] was higher" since she was amid a job search. That would mean more competition for jobs. That indicates a lack of critical thinking skills.

jpeterson• 17 years ago

It was a joke. I think what doomed her more than anything was a lack of comprehension skills from the first interviewer, and a lack of humor from the second.

cia_plant• 17 years ago

Your comment indicates a lack of reading skills. She said that she wished the number of graduating seniors who had jobs were higher.

presidentender2• 17 years ago

By golly, you're right! I'd downvote myself if I could. Looks like I owe her an apology.

kalid• 17 years ago

I think the gmail answer would have sunk her too. Google is an advertising company -- 1/4 (25%) clickthrough on Gmail ads (not even search) is just crazy. People click search ads because they're looking for something, Gmail ads probably get an order of magnitude less click through (people aren't in gmail to find new things). For someone applying to an advertising company, she needs to know their basic business model and assumptions.

If she thought about her own usage, she'd realize that it was an insanely high number (had she ever clicked on a single gmail ad, let alone 25% of them?).

dsplittgerber3• 17 years ago

Exactly. This was the main point. It's just so off. If you don't care enough about a company to understand the absolutely most basic reasoning behind their cashcow product, why should the company be interested in hiring you?

zck• 17 years ago

>If she thought about her own usage, she'd realize that it was an insanely high number...

It's dangerous to generalize from yourself like that.

friism• 17 years ago

The questions mentioned in the article don't seem particularly odious. They sound like standard "think-on-your-feet" case-based questions that management consultants and bankers also love. Demonstrating creativity and problem solving grit is more important than producing a correct number.

sown2• 17 years ago

I think it was more about how they treated her. or at least her perception of how they were treating her.

sown2• 17 years ago

I also can't help but notice that some of the interview questions were confusing or misleading when taken into context with the other questions.

The engineer says that he got lost when she mentions ads might have a 25% click through rate but in another question the click through rate was 20%, as an example. She probably thought, but did not write that her earlier estimate would have been ok or acceptable which would be confusing given the engineer's reaction.

Also, if said question was meant to test reasoning skills and not a raw answer, then a wrong estimate for click through shouldn't "lose" anyone. After all, if you haven't worked in search or heard of google or the internet ad business internals, how would you know what the click through rate should be more like? Advertising is but one of many industries.

I think google needs to be a bit more careful about how they ask questions or at least have interviewers talk to each other. Probably too difficult since they all have other tasks and duties to do.

zackattack2• 17 years ago

That wasn't a nightmare interview; she is clearly unqualified for an analytical role. She should get a job in advertising instead.

jmhgtfrwfgv• 17 years ago

Definitely - The pitch for the Nike/iPod ad was very good

jonknee2• 17 years ago

Sounds like that's what she was doing... "Associate Product Marketing Manager"

harpastum• 17 years ago

I realize that she was under some pretty severe stress, but a marketing manager that thinks gmail earns ~$70,000 a day? Or that each user will click on seven ads a day?

“Google places four ads per e-mail opened in Gmail. Advertisers get to pick their click-through rates, which can be as little as $0.05...Say each G-mail user opens seven new e-mails a day. They would see 28 ads. If they click on ¼ of those ads, then only seven ads are clicked."

Gmail probably has something like 150 million users, so her figure of 7 ads clicked per user at a minimum of 5 cents a click would result in 52.5 million dollars a day. At some point she should have realized the void between her new analysis and her original $70,000 guess. The whole point of the question is to examine your analytical and estimation skills. The fact that she didn't notice that she was moving towards and answer 750 times the size of the her last one says a lot.

zackattack2• 17 years ago

Um, a marketing manager is an analytical role. When I said a "a role in advertising" I was referring to making ads, or ad copy.

jxcole• 17 years ago

To be honest, a moderately intelligent 5th grader could have answered that question about the 10 cents per ad. I know that math isn't her field, but on some level one is expected to be well rounded.

flatline• 17 years ago

I could see having trouble answering something like this over the phone - especially if you have a bit of math phobia. That being said, Google was probably not the best match for her. Her guess at clickthrough rates was also kind of painful.

Shana7• 17 years ago

I've taught some very intillegent third graders. No. No they wouldn't have under the time constraints and pressures. People blank with pressure. The first thing the interviewer should do is lay off the pressure not turn it on. Seniors and Out of Job People tend to freak.

First easy thing to do which isn't describe. Tell the person to sit down with a pen and paper. And then talk about the why and how. That was the demeaning part. Antoi-collaborative, very scary.

barrkel3• 17 years ago

Just having math questions written down in front of you without time pressure and dead air makes them about 1000% easier.

wglb• 17 years ago

In engineering school, we got pretty familiar with BOEC (back of the envelope calculations), in some part to give a double check on calculations, and in other part (ahem) to double-check on slide rule calculations and exponent correction.

But that is a useful skill, particularly in conjunction with a problem-solving attitude which they repeatedly emphasized us to do.

And the book Innumeracy by Paulos gives examples of good problems to check with: "Is there a cubic mile of human blood in the world" and "How long would it take to move Mount Fuji" as a couple of examples.

It doesn't sound like a good sign if your latest math was as a freshman if you are looking for a software career.

jaydub• 17 years ago

I would tend to agree, and for those interested in this type of skill I think its worth checking out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_problem

mronge2• 17 years ago

This was for a marketing position though, not an engineering position. I wouldn't expect someone trained in marketing to be good at BOEC or be as analytical as an engineer.

yummyfajitas• 17 years ago

She also bombed a middle school level math problem.

One question (paraphrased): $0.10 cpc, with a 20% of visits resulting in a click. How many visits needed to make $20?

After five painful minutes the annoyed interviewer gave me the answer...She made it sound so easy; I felt like a moron.

She is innumerate.

If I were illiterate, I'd probably describe an interview at McGraw Hill as nightmarish. "After five painful minutes of trying to sound out the words the annoyed interviewer read the sentence to me...She made it sound so easy; I felt like a moron."

aaronblohowiak• 17 years ago

These seem like soft-ball questions all around. Phone screening is such a pain in the ass, I am surprised that more people don't have a timed web form or similar setup so we can avoid having to waste the hours talking to people that aren't going to make the cut.

jazzychad3• 17 years ago

> avoid having to waste the hours talking to people that aren't going to make the cut.

chicken/egg... how are you going to know that without talking to them?

However, to that end, could you just raise the bar on the resumes and also the subequent first-round phone screens to reduce the number of 2nd-, 3rd-round interviews? The Google application (for non-college recruits) is already extensive and probably acts as a weed-out mechanism for many people deciding to just apply on a whim.

wallflower• 17 years ago

Rigorous interviews will increase the false negative rate, at the expense of false positives. It's part of the culture at Microsoft and Google and other companies.

cdibona3• 17 years ago

I don't know why people are downvoting you. I can tell you that I've seen the same thing and having dealt with the fallout of bad hiring, I'd rather miss some good or even great candidates rather than hire someone bad. Edi: To clarify: I work at Google.

roc• 17 years ago

You always run the risk of hiring someone bad. Interviewing, particularly rigorous interviewing, is a game that doesn't map very well onto work itself.

That's why the true test of a hiring process is the firing process.

If you can get rid of people that can't hack it, rather than letting them gather as detritus in your system, you'll be far better off than if you simply pretend that you can actually avoid mistakes.

Periodic• 17 years ago

Rigorous interviews will increase the number of false negatives, but decrease the number of false positives. I think your wording doesn't make that clear.

When the cost of a false positive is high, e.g. a bad employee can be very expensive in terms of time and money before he is identified and fired if he is fired at all, then it is worth the cost of a few more false negatives to be more sure that you aren't getting false positives.

It seems that very often someone who is the victim of being a false negative will rail against the system and claim it is unfair. If you can get them to look at it from the other side they will often agree the practice is quite reasonable.

jrockway2• 17 years ago

Sounds like she is the "recite facts" type, rather than "quickly think critically" type. Google wants the second type of person, and it appears she is not that. So the interview process worked perfectly; she didn't get a job she wouldn't be good at, and Google doesn't have an employee that doesn't fit with them. I fail to see how this is a nightmare, other than that she'll have to work somewhere that makes her buy her own lunch.

strlen• 17 years ago

What's also important is that it was a phone screen: this also saved employees' time on interviewing the person and company's time on flying out, wining and dining the person.

tomsaffell• 17 years ago

Totally agree that she was not right for the job, but the process was a bit nightmare-ish :

  “That’s all.  Good luck with your job search.”  The phone clicked-- I was stunned.

In my previous job I conducted a lot of interviews of an analytical style. Some people bombed so badly that is was clear well before the end that they wouldn't make the next round. In those cases, I used the remaining time to either talk to them about the career hopes/goals, or to explain how they could have better approached the problem (these skills are partly learnt..) to help prepare them for their next interview. The way I saw it was that they were expecting 30 mins of my time, so they would get it, even if they weren't up to the job. It a courtesy, and it's also self interest - burnt interviewees make a lot of noise on campus.

When I was 'senior' I never applied to McKinsey, because I'd heard so many horror stories about their interviews - I just didn't want to go anywhere near them. I landed a job with one of their main competitors and spent 5 happy years there...

ashishbharthi• 17 years ago

Googlers are not that bad at ending interviews either. I think this was just one perticular person (Anna) thing.

uuilly• 17 years ago

I totally agree. A company gains nothing by being dismissive. I've interviewed at about 20 companies in the last 10 years, not to mention VC / Angel pitches. Only Google left a foul taste in my mouth. As a CS guy I've had dozens of analytical interviews and have largely done well with them. But the guy who interviewed me from Google acted as if he was doing me a favor. He was curt from the first moment and would sigh and groan if I asked for more specifics on a question. He too basically hung up on me.

ig1• 17 years ago

That's debatable. Many candidates would rather just end a failed interview early and do something they'd like with their time.

webwright• 17 years ago

The interview process in this case worked fine. But it's silly and probably causes them to miss a LOT of good candidates. It's measuring a subjects ability to think critically... quickly and while under a lot of pressure.

Is SPEED of critical thinking important? How many positions at Google require people to think on their feet? How many positions require them to be comfortable/effective talking to strangers on the phone (for this woman's position, it might be the case)?

Check out the War For Talent ( https://www.amazon.com/dp/157851459 )... Andrew Chen has a good blog post talking about it: http://andrewchenblog.com/2009/07/28/what-if-interviews-poor...

Bottom line is that studies show over and over that "if you look at the marks that people get coming out of a hiring process versus the on-the-job marks they get in their first year in a job, they are actually not correlated at all."

donaldc• 17 years ago

Speed of critical thinking for simple questions like the $0.10 ad-click question probably is important. If someone can't figure out the answer to that one pretty fast, they're probably not going to successfully figure out really hard problems at all.

jtbarrett• 17 years ago

With regards to your last point: I don't doubt that the vast majority of hiring processes aren't correlated with on-the-job success, but Google is definitely the kind of company that would strive for objective measures and to refine their process. They at least claim it's working. I think it was on the Stack Overflow podcast that I heard a discussion of Peter Norvig's remarks about this in Coders at Work. He evidently posted something similar online:

"Our interviews are more to do with practical problem solving, not with puzzles and tricks. Our interview scores actually correlate very well with on-the-job performance: we are doing quite well at hiring the right people, we believe, and we work hard at analyzing the process. Peter Seibel asked me if there was anything counterintuitive about the process and I said that people who got one low score but were hired anyway did well on-the-job. To me, that means the interview process is doing very well, not that it is broken. It means that we don't let one bad interview blackball a candidate. We'll keep interviewing, keep hiring, and keep analyzing the results to improve the process." http://www.mv-voice.com/square/index.php?i=3&d=&t=16...

te_platt• 17 years ago

I thought it was funny that the link she gave to "15 Google Interview Questions That Will Make You Feel Stupid" has wrong answers in the solutions. See if you can beat their answer for the two egg problem - Bonus prove your answer is actually the minimum possible.

andreyf3• 17 years ago

They also got this one wrong, both in asking the question, and in answering it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirate_game

jongraehl2• 17 years ago

dlevine• 17 years ago

I worked for Google for a few years, and did a lot of phone screens. Most of the people who I interviewed probably felt the same way as this lady. The process may seem brutal, but it is impossible to invite everyone in for an on-site interview, and the phone screen does a pretty good job of filtering out the definite nos (although I'm sure that some good candidates are rejected).

I could count the number of people who passed one of my phone screens on one hand (and I considered myself a fairly easy interviewer).

dangrover2• 17 years ago

I can't stand talking to people from companies like Google, they're always so smug and judgmental like that.

Part of my decision to drop out of the job market and focus full-time on my company (to pretty reasonable success this year) is because I like being paid based on a judgement of my work/products, rather than some half-assed assessment of me as a person made in an interview.

blinks• 17 years ago

> rather than some half-assed assessment of me as a person > made in an interview.

Any judgement made in a 45-minute (or less!) interview is going to be half-assed. That's the unfortunate way of the world. How do you think people should interview?

(Genuinely curious; I do interviews, and I think I do pretty well, but it's difficult to honestly examine one's own methods without feedback.)

BigDamnDeal2• 17 years ago

I bet the commenter above would prefer to be judged on his accomplishments as an interviewer, rather than some half-assed assessment of him as a person made in a comment.

anigbrowl5• 17 years ago

Out of curiosity (I have no plans to apply to Google), what kind of criteria are used to identify prospective candidates? For example, does Google only look at the top 10% of academic performers and winnow from there, or sample across the board and then start filtering for critical thinking? I'm just thinking about the fact that many industry luminaries didn't bother to finish college, but rather stayed long enough to pick up some new intellectual tools and then started selling their ideas as soon as they had decided which way the wind was blowing.

crucini• 17 years ago

How many industries luminaries would be good contributors at Google? Wozniak, who prided himself on building circuits with fewer chips than anyone thought possible?

Would he be happy programming in Java?

mrshoe• 17 years ago

Google has interviewed tens of thousands of candidates in this manner. Other companies have interviewed even more, using roughly the same process. With all the preparation this girl put into her interview, I don't see how she possibly could have been surprised by those types of questions. The first piece of advice anyone will give you is that the final answer is not nearly as important as talking through the process you would use to solve the problem. Obviously she never even read that first piece of advice, because she blurted out a wild guess to the very first question. Don't let this happen to you!

Google's interview process isn't a nightmare. It's entirely typical. If you plan on interviewing for any job, you should spend a lot of time studying the interview process and how to excel in it. If you're interviewing for programming jobs, this course is an invaluable resource: http://courses.csail.mit.edu/iap/interview/

Read all the handouts 5 times, and you won't be caught off guard like this girl was.

d0mine• 17 years ago

Direct links to handouts:

http://courses.csail.mit.edu/iap/interview/Hacking_a_Google_...

timcederman2• 17 years ago

For an associate product manager position, it only gets harder.

I quite enjoyed the back of the envelope calculations during the early calls, as well as talking about interesting products I had encountered recently.

It got quite interesting on-site. I really enjoyed the first couple of days of interviews, which focused on design ("design a shopping mall"). The last day was still fun, but less enjoyable, as it involved coding on a whiteboard, estimating the computational complexity, and then improving its efficiency. Then I was asked to spec out the requirements for adding unit tests to a programming language.

I felt the interviews were fair and well-balanced, the main sticking point for me was the emphasis on GPA and academic history.

mronge2• 17 years ago

Those were questions for an engineering position right? Not a a product manager position?

timcederman2• 17 years ago

No, APM.

zachware• 17 years ago

This wasn't an interview, it was a test. I had a similar experience with a startup. I was interviewing for a Marketing Communications Manager position. Essentially PR.

One of the unofficial interviewers (at 24 year old MIT engineer working as an email marketer) challenged me with the question "How many barbers are in San Francisco?" We proceeded to map it out the analytical process on the whiteboard. He wanted to see formulas to understand how I would arrive at the answer.

It was a stupid, impossible question. In a similar way to this girl's experience, he jabbed repeatedly critiquing my logic.

He wrote me later to explain that he posed the same question to his girlfriend, an MIT engineer herself, and she couldn't come up with an answer. Neither could he.

They offered me the job and I declined solely based on this guy and his misguided, silly behavior. I would have hated to work with him.

When a company misguidedly challenges potential employees in this way it hurts the quality of its hires. Sure, Google can afford to be picky but does it really need an engineer in a Product Marketing role? Perhaps for dev-facing apps but such an interview process is overall misguided and immature.

andreyf3• 17 years ago

Maybe you forgot to mention it, but how did you go from "discussing an intentionally impossible problem" to "misguided, silly behavior"? If your ego makes it upsetting to work with people who "jab repeatedly, critiquing [your] logic", or find it upsetting not being able to answer a question, that says quite a lot about what kind of work environment you'd be a good fit for.

diN0bot3• 17 years ago

mmmmm....yes and no. if you perceives critique negatively, that's a problem with your attitude. you'll never find a good place to work because you'll react poorly to natural differences and disagreements. if others are aggressive or negative that's a problem with them, especially if they're not interested in self-analyzing and learning to be mindful.

we don't know the situation in this case.

zaidf• 17 years ago

I disagree. I actually think the questions in both your example and google's was good in seeing how you approach a problem. The point is not the answer. It is the approach.

I can think back to meetings where questions of similar nature have popped up. You have guys that want the precise numbers and refuse to make any assumption of any sort. You have guys that throw stupid guesses and just want to move forward. You have guys that do a little bit of thinking to come to a quick but critically thought out answer. This seems like a good way to identify which category you fall in and whether your approach is a good fit for the job.

anigbrowl5• 17 years ago

I don't think this is such a terrible thing, although clearly this adversarial approach to testing ideas isn't for you, or everyone. Enrico Fermi used to challenge grad students with similar questions, the famous example being 'how many piano tuners in Chicago?'.

I don't think it's a stupid or impossible question, but one that seeks to establish how you go about estimating tricky things and thus identifying fruitful territory for more rigorous research. Let's walk through it, with the awareness that we're trying to refine our techniques of estimation rather than caring about the actual number of barbers.

'Barber' implies haircuts for men. This is good, because the number of hairstylists that cater to women depends on fashion, which is hard to quantify. On the other hand, hair cutting is more related to hair growth. There's about 3/4 of a million people in San Francisco. Roughly half of them are men, so we have 375,000 potential customers. Most men wear their hair short, off the ears. Of course some wear their hair long and have it cut very infrequently, while others like it much shorter, eg with a buzz cut and have it cut more often...but some of them may cut their own hair, since a buzz-cut isn't too challenging. I'm going to assume the number of hippies cancels out the number of close-cutters because San Francisco has a bit of a hippy reputation. So much for hairstyling.

OK, so I've postulated 375,000 men who average out to a 'regular hairstyle'. And I've postulated that a regular hairstyle means not having your ears covered, ie the old 'short back and sides'. While it's growing, you could comb it out of the way or let it cover the tops of your ears, but once it gets half-way down then you're either growing it out or it's time to visit the barber. How much hair is that? My ears are about 2 inches high, but I have small ears. 3 inches sounds pretty big though...I'll guess the average is 2.5 inches, so half of that is 1.25 inches. That's already pretty fluffy though...let's round it down to 1 inch. OK, so 375,000 men get a haircut whenever their hair has grown by more than an inch.

How long does that take? Hair grows at about 4 inches a year, so let's say 3 months. Which gives us 1.5 million male haircuts a year for the whole city. (we could have started calling the population p and the rate of hair growth g[h] and so on, but why bother, it's a chain of reasoning we're concerned with here). A haircut takes, what, 20 minutes? it could be faster, then again some want a more difficult style. So let's guess that there's half a million hours of actual hair cutting (including the bit with the sheet and the sweeping up etc) going on in a year in SF.

Now we're getting somewhere. How much does a barber work? I'd say 45 hours a week. Some barbershops open early for the business crowd, but then they're closed on Saturdays. Monday-Saturday seems reasonable, as does 2 weeks' holiday. So one barber could spend a maximum of 2500 hours per year cutting hair. Only, that seems a bit high. Sometimes you wait in line, but I don't usually think of barbers as busy flat-out most of the time. 30 hours of cutting and 15 hours a week of of waiting for a customer seems more realistic. So 1500 hours of haircutting per barber (edit: 1650, but who cares). And dividing that into half a million hours of cuttable male hair per year gives me 333, the number of people needed to cut all that hair.

At this point you can start arguing about whether someone that caters to both men and women is truly a barber, or whether women can be said to be barbers even if they only cut men's hair. If your answers to those questions are no and no, and we go with the stereotype of a barber as a man who only cuts other men's hair, then I'd halve these numbers and guess that the number of 'pure' barbers in SF is 75-100.

OK, so this is 10 minutes of my life I won't get back, but if I was going to market something specific to barbers then I now have a decent guess at the number of potential customers in my local metro area.

Of course, you could have just said 'pass me a copy of the Yellow Pages and I'll tell you'. So having done the above, I went and looked that up and got 131 results at http://www.superpages.com/yellowpages/C-Barbers/S-CA/T-San+F... ...with 2 or 3 cutters at each shop, that would suggest somewhere in the 3-400 range, but some of these entries are for Salons and some are in Daly city or Sausalito, not quite in San Francisco. Still not definitive, but not too far off either. Sure, there's a lot of guessing and hand-waving here...but the important thing is that I arrived at an estimate that roughly correlates with reality. In this case I was able to check that reality (by looking up the number of self-identified barbering businesses) but once you become adept at this technique you can use it for anything, and then get on with solving the problem instead of feeling stuck by a lack of information.

colbyolson• 17 years ago

Wow. That was cool. Thanks for walking through the logic/reasoning.

potatolicious2• 17 years ago

Maybe it's the traditionally educated engineering in me (I was trained as a mechanical engineer), but I don't see a point in this purely theoretical hand-wavy math. There are established ways for us to get good estimates of a great deal of information - including your hairdresser problem - that involve seeking out real data. Sitting in a void of zero knowledge and postulating wildly, even if it gets you in the ballpark, is wildly inefficient and I'd hate to be involved in it as part of a professional company.

A number out of your ass - regardless of how soundly backed with logic - is at the end of the day a number out of your ass. This isn't to say that all inference or estimation is bad - but rather that estimations done in a complete void of background data is practically useless.

A more concrete example: estimate the number of users our chief competitor has. I can go through this like a logic puzzle and come up with a number that has zero verifiability... or I can go look up relevant data (their page rank on Google, other available metrics on their site, etc) and arrive at a far better conclusion.

I agree with the GP that these exercises are pointless and unrelated to the job for which you are interviewing. As a traditionally educated engineer, my training teaches me not to guess whenever facts are available. Don't try to memorize and infer numbers - keep your references within reach at all times. An engineer who makes few assumptions about his data is one who makes fewer mistakes and costs less money in damage.

Shana7• 17 years ago

You know, the University of Chicago still sounds like it.

The best answer would be, there are 14 haircutting places within the shopping disctructs of the U of C, and it is currently overzoned for hair currently, accroding to the maroon. Only two are true barbershops. It consists of three long blocks. Lets take the U of C landscape to be somewhat abnormal, and that there should really only be 7, of which 1 is a barbershop. There are about 24 neighborhoods in chicago. There should be 24 barbershops...ect ect....

Just for the record...

ismarc• 17 years ago

Your logic is flawed (as is nearly every "solution" to one of these problems I've seen). The question wasn't "How many barbers should there be?" It was "How many barbers are there?" This is an important distinction as your approach shows the appropriate number of barber shops that can reasonably be operated and have no shortage of customers due to hair growth speeds. I would approach the problem from the opposite direction. How many distinct professions are there in San Francisco? What is the current population? What are the percentage breakdowns of those professions? At that point, you can easily get the number of people employed as barbers. Now, did they want individual barbers, or the number of barber shops? You then only need to infer the number of barbers per shop, rather than estimating a lot of data that isn't readily available.

ephermata• 17 years ago

The "how many X are in Y" is also known as a "case study question." From what I understand it's a standard practice in interviews for consulting companies, such as Bain or McKinsey. I've never seen one in an interview, but friends of mine who took that route obsessed over them.

As your interviewer said, these questions are asked just to see how you will come up with an answer. The actual number hardly matters, so long as you can sell it to the interviewer. Pushing you is part of the process, as well, to see how you hold up "under pressure."

If you want to be uncharitable, this is much like what a management consultant does -- come in, get some problem from a troubled company ("How can we improve sales by 20% in six months?"), develop a strategy, and then convince the client that they should do it. The interview technique makes sense for that context because it selects for people who can pull this off.

Actually, for a PR role I don't think this question is such a bad fit. You will have to think quickly on your feet, answer hostile people, and come up with diplomatic, plausible answers to crazy questions ("why does your product not work with Slackware?"). The precise answer is of course important, since if you're wrong you will be caught, but how you react is more important.

DaniFong• 17 years ago

Isn't the sizing of markets something of marketers need to do, all day long? You can't blow $20k for a Gartner report every time you imagine a new market. You need to be able to make some ballpark estimates.

These 'stupid impossible questions' have a long history. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_problem

(Barbers cut the hair of half the population (the male half) around every two months. The population of San Francisco is about 750k. A haircut takes about 30 minutes, and about 50% of the time a barber is cutting hair. This gives about 8 cuts per day, or about 60x8 = 480 haircuts per every two months. So to service 750k/2 of the population you need about 750k / (2 x 480)) = about 781 barbers. Or roughly one out of a thousand people is a barber.)

drewcrawford• 17 years ago

I interviewed with Google a year ago and was pretty disappointed. One interviewer was a no-show, another was over half an hour late.

I know Google is a big company and all (sampling space fail) but that really turned me off.

scscsc• 17 years ago

' “Say an advertiser makes $0.10 every time someone clicks on their ad. Only 20% of people who visit the site click on their ad. How many people need to visit the site for the advertiser to make $20?” I froze. The problem sounded easy but I didn’t want to cause an awkward silence trying to solve it. '

The problem only sounded easy? Isn't this what you learn in 3rd grade? When you can't do this stuff you shouldn't be allowed near numbers.

rudd• 17 years ago

Yeah, it's easy. When you deal with logic problems all day. Or if you're used to solving problems in your head.

Personally, I solved it easily in my head. But, I had to read the problem the first time, then read it again slowly getting all the numbers into the proper places in my head. An interview is a stressful place, so easy things can get a lot harder.

dantheman• 17 years ago

She spent 5 minutes on it, 5 Minutes...

diN0bot3• 17 years ago

would it have been awkward to write down the equation and then solve it? keeping a legible notebook and writing documentation are even better than doing things in your head and spewing magic numbers. i frequently have reason to do back of the envelope sanity checks...no reason not to use an envelope or a notebook, though.

pyre2• 17 years ago

That might be more obvious to the interviewee if the interview were done in a room with a whiteboard. They could ask to use the whiteboard to sort things out. Over the phone it's possible for people to get the impression that they are supposed to spew and answer right away. It's just a matter of mindset though.

Shana7• 17 years ago

I'm her age. This is essentially a case question straight out of a consulting book. I'm out of practice for it. Way out of practice. Meanwhile, I'm scared stiff of applying for jobs because my entire class has gone crazy about how to behave, what to say, what is the right answer to questions like this. I know I'm not perfect already. I know I have work to do to get better. and the bAck of the evenvelop question is one of my weak points. And I know it.

First thing I discovered though from helping other people on other sorts of collaborative projects on the web:

Get paper for this stuff if you are out of practice, and ask to wait for an aswer while you write it down, and if you forget something, as to repeat. Always good to write somehting down- shows you are listening. She didn't.

Be a little more wild with your answer. Not over the top. But just a little. I got that last night from someone at McKinsey. Was talkign to a class of mine about the history of business. Someone asked. Don't be too much though.

And reach out about your humanness. Not everyone is perfect. If your weak point is Back of the envelope stuff, then it is your weak point.

Speaking of which, since I am taking my time (becuase I can't freak out any more, I just can't) How do I brush up on those questions? And that way of thinking. I'm good on the creative side with large data sets and how to sort out problems, but not on the calculations side...which sucks.

dsplittgerber3• 17 years ago

You sound like you're going to break down any minute. Seriously, please relax! If a company seriously cares about the exact wording of your answers, you obviously would not want to work there. Management consultancy is a load of stuff any intelligent and hard-working human can do, they just want to test your basic intelligence and reasoning and check to see if you seem like a sufficiently nice human. Don't sweat it that much, your live doesn't depend on what McKinsey thinks of you.

Shana7• 17 years ago

I realize that. I also don't want to work for McKinsey. I don't think management consulting would be a good fit. Really, I think I have too much of humorous subversive streak for that.

I realize I can do a lot of things with time and effort. I feel pressure on the time part, Overloaded. I'm doing a bit too much on top of that. I'm a little less that one week to my bachelor's critique in new media/internet art. We're a crazy bunch of folk, them artists. Long term I want to switch to learning coding, and haven't had the time to sit down and even think yet...

Or really apply for jobs yet. That's uhhh after next week, after I finish classes. When I know where I'm living/doing. That's normal for a college student though where I am...jumpy folk, mostly halfway through a very short midterm cycle...BA nearly got deleted, those sorts of things. still coming off of that sort of thing.

ganley• 17 years ago

Oh, please. Perhaps they care about pedigree and GPA for new grads, but what else do they have to go on? I'm 40, and they didn't seem to care at all where I went to school nor what my grades were. The interview was challenging, but a lot of fun (the good kind of challenging), and certainly not a "nightmare."

kscaldef• 17 years ago

I agree. Whenever I read one of these articles, I feel like I should post my own story of how I interviewed at Google and it was completely reasonable, if expectedly rigorous. I really only had two complaints: 1) they sent me to lunch with a guy who works on AdSense, and at the time I was working at Yahoo on their Content Match system, so we had a pretty awkward time trying to figure out what we could talk about without disclosing anything confidential, and 2) it took a really long time after my interviews for them to actually produce an offer (maybe 4 weeks or so), although their recruiter did give me regular updates of what was going on in the process.

FWIW, they did ask me for a lot of awfully detailed information about my current and past compensation packages and what other companies I was interviewing with. I mostly declined to provide that information, and they didn't push it.

boredguy82• 17 years ago

I liked the "quiz" question someone posted on the linked "Business Insider" article:

You work for a digital age media company who has already achieved superior market dominance in an industry rife with failure and turnover. Your company's stock, though depressed, still sells for multiples above its competition and the option pool is pretty full and limited.

The company's single main product continues to grow its revenues nicely but has failed at virtually all attempts to broaden its product line so it remains reliant on its single huge product which may come under government anti-trust action at some point in the future to say nothing of two leading competitors aiming to unseat it. It's only other breakthrough products are given away free or at nominal charge with no discernable profitable business model.

Is it a good career choice to join or stay with this firm even though they pride themselves on asking stupid quiz questions to gauge your intelligence and make you feel very special if you are offered a position?

jrockway2• 17 years ago

Speculation is for investors. As long as you get your paycheck, who cares? (And "when" they stop giving paychecks, Google will look pretty good on your resume'.)

Why are people so upset about the "quiz questions"? Is it unreasonable for an employer to expect you to think? (Is the "right answer" ever the goal of these questions?)

boredguy82• 17 years ago

I don't know why people are upset. I don't, however, think there's a category of "thinking" to which these questions provide insight. I use a completely different toolset when answering quiz questions than when I'm answering "real life" questions. "Railroad crossing watch out for cars, can you spell that without any R's" is a typical 'quiz' question that asks you to abandon ways we know people interact. Asking someone, "How many pounds of tonails are cut every year?" is asinine.

antirez• 17 years ago

Non critical thinking people are not worse as they can have other strong skills like immagination or creativity or ability to understand user feeling or simply a lot of taste. I think that with this kind of interview Google is creating a monoculture inside the company. The effects may be the fact Google has some problem pushing web services where technological strenght can not do a real difference.

Gilson_Silveira• 17 years ago

I think those kinds of quizzes doesn't extract how good or bad the person is for the job.

I wouldn't work for a company that rate a person by quizzes or tricky questions.

ilkhd• 17 years ago

I once came on interview with a very big company, a lady that interviewed me slowly began to become medieval and very angry - for no reason, so I got afraid of her and just walked away myself, for goodnes sake. A guy before her was friendly.

danbmil99• 17 years ago

My Google interviewer had a toothache. I didn't get an offer. Their recruiters are notoriously independent; not sure that's a good thing. I was actively sought out, but had no chance because the interviewer had a bad day.

Question: is it more important to keep out the bad ones but lose some good ones, or vice versa? (ie, what's the correct balance between false positives and false negatives?)

andreyf3• 17 years ago

I've heard from several Googlers that false positives are orders of magnitude worse than false negatives. In reality, I think it's more clear-cut - there are those developers who know all about tries, algorithms, parsers, GC strategies, unit testing, OS level details, networking, etc., and those developers who know how to program in Blub for Blub libraries. For most positions, Google wants the former.

giardini• 17 years ago

I am mystified that companies use interviews in hiring despite the overwhelming academic evidence that interviewing does not work,

I conjecture that what we are discussing is primate social behavior (yes, "monkeys in a tree") and social hierarchy in action. Of course we _are_ primates, so maybe it _is_ vital that Google hire enough "alpha males" or whatever.

My Nightmare Interviews With Google

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