Getting a job at Google is surely a dream for most.
Ranked among the world's 'best workplaces' year after year, Google is also one of the toughest companies to get into.
The company is known for asking difficult and tricky interview questions. While it's never easy or rather impossible to guess the interview questions one will have to face, it is always better to prepare as best as one can for the job he/she is applying for. Here we've compiled a list of some of the most difficult questions asked during job interviews at Google for a variety of job profiles.
All these questions were submitted to the job-community website Glassdoor by users who were interviewed at Google.
While some of these candidates made it, it was hard luck for others.
Profile: Software engineer
Q1. Implement a binary tree and explain it's function.
Q2. Create a cost model that allows Google to make purchasing decisions on to compare the cost of purchasing more RAM memory for their servers vs buying more disk space.
Q3. Write an iterator over multiple collections.
Q4. How do you check if a URL is bad really fast in Google server.
The point is for the user not to notice the lag in the checking.
Q5. Design a system or algorithm to catalog all of the worlds books?
Profile: Senior software engineer
Q6. Develop a solution to convex hull and state its complexity.
Q7. How many golf balls can fit in a school bus?
Q8. Write a probability formula to tell how many bits will be changed when 1 is added to a 32 bit binary number.
Profile: Associate product manager
Q9. What is the marginal cost of a gigabyte in Gmail?
Profile: Engineer
Q10. If you were given the land prices in the Bay Area, what would you pick, the mean or the median? Why?
Profile: Product manager
Q11. What happens from the point when you type in a URL in your browser to the point the page gets displayed?
Q12. If you host a celebrity website which displays ads and suddenly notice a drop in traffic to your site/clicks on ads, how do you root cause the issue?
Profile: AdSense account manager
Q13. what is the next billion dollar idea for Google?
Profile: Programmer
Q14. How would you implement an MS Paint clone?
Q15. What objects and methods would you need, how would they draw on the canvas, and what UI elements would be necessary?
Profile: Patent docketing specialist
Q16. You have 7 balls. One weighs more than the others (not significantly). You have a scale, like the scales of justice. Describe how to find the weighted ball only using the scale twice.
Profile: Project manager
Q17. If you have a vacant field and add one flower and the number of flowers doubles everyday and at the end of 45 days, the field is full, on what day is the field half full?
Profile: Rich media campaign manager
Q18. How many people do you think are using their cell phone in the entire world at this very moment?
Profile: Mobile product manager
Q19. Do you know what "Peak Oil" is? Yes? good.
You are the product manager of Peak Oil for Google. What do you do?
Profile: AdWords representative
Q20. How many buses are there in Hyderabad?
Profile: Industry leader
Q21. How do you think Media Agencies make money?
