When I say that I’ll be shocked if you can answer more than one of the Google interview questions below I want you to know that it’s not an affront to you at all. These questions are just extremely difficult, and many of them have been banned from interviews at Google because they’ve made geniuses feel like total nincompoops.
Each of these questions was featured in the book ‘The Google Resume: How to Prepare for a Career and Land a Job at Apple, Microsoft, Google, or any Top Tech Company’ (Buy Here: $4.70 Hardcover), and each of these questions will make you feel like a total moron.
The answers to the questions below are further down this page, so just keep scrolling after you’ve attempted to solve the questions.
via Business Insider:
1. Q: How many golf balls can fit in a school bus?
2. Q: How much should you charge to wash all the windows in Seattle?
3. Q: In a country where every family continues to have children until they have a boy. If they have a girl, they have another child. If they have a boy, they stop. What is the proportion of boys to girls in the country?
4. Q: How many piano tuners are there in the entire world?
5. Q: Why are manhole covers round?
6. Q: How many times a day do a clock’s hands overlap?
7. Q: A man pushed his car to a hotel and lost his fortune. What happened?
8. Q: You’re the captain of a pirate ship and your crew gets to vote on how the gold is divided up. If fewer than half of the pirates agree with you, you die. How do you recommend apportioning the gold in such a way that you get a good share of the booty but still survive?
9. Q: You are shrunk to the height of a nickel and your mass is proportionally reduced 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?
10. Q: You have eight balls all of the same size… 7 of them weigh the same, and one of them weighs slightly more. How can you find the ball that is heavier by using a balance and only two weighings?
Did you write your answers down? Because I’ve included them below. Get ready to feel dumb.
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1A: This is one of those questions Google asks just to see if the applicant can explain the key challenge to solving the problem.
2A: This is one of those questions where the trick is to come up with an easier answer than the one that’s seemingly being called for. We’d say. “$10 per window.”
3A: Imagine you have 10 couples who have 10 babies: 5 will be girls, 5 will be boys. (Total babies made: 10, with 5 boys and 5 girls.)
The 5 couples who had girls will have 5 babies. Half (2.5) will be girls. Half (2.5) will be boys. Add 2.5 boys to the 5 already born and 2.5 girls to the 5 already born. (Total babies made: 15, with 7.5 boys and 7.5 girls.)
The 2.5 couples that had girls will have 2.5 babies. Half (1.25) will be boys and half (1.25) will be girls. Add 1.25 boys to the 7.5 boys already born and 1.25 girls to the 7.5 already born. (Total babies: 17.5 with 8.75 boys and 8.75 girls.)
And so on, maintaining a 50-50 population.4A: We’d answer “However many the market dictates. If pianos need tuning once a week, and it takes an hour to tune a piano and a piano tuner works 8 hours a day for 5 days a week 40 pianos need tuning each week. We’d answer one for every 40 pianos.” On Wikipedia, they call this a Fermi problem.
5A: So it doesn’t fall through the manhole (when the plane, ordinarily flush with the plane of the street, goes perpendicular to the street).
6A: 22 times
7A: He landed on Boardwalk
8A: You divide the booty evenly between the top 51% of the crew.
9A: This one is all about the judging interviewee’s creativity. We’d try to break the electric motor.
10: Take 6 of the 8 balls and put 3 on each side of the scale. If the heavy ball isn’t in the group of 6, you know it’s one of the remaining 2 and so you put those two in the scale and determine which one. If the heavy ball is in the 6, you have narrowed it down to 3. Of those 3, pick any 2 and put them on the scale. If the heavy ball is in that group of 2, you know which one it is. If both balls are of equal weight, then the heavy ball is the one you sat to the side.
So, there are actually 15 of these Impossible Google Interview Questions, not 10, so if you want to read the other five just click that link and head on over to Business Insider!
(h/t IFL Science)