Are You Smart Enough to Work at Google?: Trick Questions, Zen-like Riddles, Insanely Difficult Puzzles, and Other Devious Interviewing Techniques You Need to Know to Get a Job Anywhere in the New Economy

ISBN-13: 9780316099981

Media Type: Paperback

Publisher: Little - Brown and Company

Publication Date: 09-04-2012

Pages: 304

Product Dimensions: 5.50(w) x 8.25(h) x 0.75(d)

William Poundstone is the author of fourteen books — including Rock Breaks Scissors, Are You Smart Enough to Work at Google?, How Would You Move Mount Fuji?, and Fortune's Formula, which was Amazon Editor's pick for the number one nonfiction book of the year. He has written for the Believer, the Economist, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Esquire, Harper's, Harvard Business Review, the New York Times op-ed page and Book Review, and Village Voice. Follow Poundstone on Twitter (@WPoundstone) and learn more at his website, home.williampoundstone.net

Read an Excerpt

Are You Smart Enough to Work at Google?

Little, Brown and Company

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 high school students applying to Harvard gets accepted. As at Harvard, Google employees must pass 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 nickel 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?”

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. Google regularly ranks at or near the top of Fortune’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, foosball, and air-hockey tables; cutesy touches like red British 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 takeout 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 Whole Foods to a person visiting from another country?”

• “Tell me how Target competes with Walmart, and how we should reposition our brand to gain market share.”

• “How would you get more customers for Wachovia?”

• “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 math. 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.”

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Table of Contents

1 Outnumbered at the Googleplex

What It Takes to Get Hired at a Hyperselective Company 3

2 The Cult of Creativity

A History of Human Resources, or Why Interviewers Go Rogue 21

3 Punked and Outweirded

How the Great Recession Mainstreamed Bizarre Interview Questions 42

4 Google's Hiring Machine

How They Pick the One to Hire out of the 130 Who Apply 51

5 Engineers and How Not to Think Like Them

The Value of Keeping Things Simple 68

6 A Field Guide to Devious Interview Questions

Decoding the Interviewer's Hidden Agendas 80

7 Whiteboarding

The Art of the Visual Solution 97

8 Dr. Fermi and the Extraterrestrials

How to Estimate Just About Anything in Sixty Seconds or Less 106

9 The Unbreakable Egg

Questions That Ask "How Would You…?" 114

10 Weighing Your Head

What to Do When You Draw a Blank 125

Answers 137

Acknowledgments 257

Websites and Videos 259

Notes 261

Bibliography 271

Index 277