How to Crack Google?

Question

I am planning to apply for Google? What kind of questions is asked by Google? How to crack it? Can you suggest some books, interview questions etc etc to crack the Google?

And BTW, I will be honest and I will be myself. But, still need some more guidance to step towards the dream..

Answer 1

Just be honest

Answer 2

Get that job at Google

Answer 3

Be yourself.

Answer 4

I found these questions on this site. That should give you at hint of what you are up against.

1. How many golf balls can fit in a school bus?
2. 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?
3. How much should you charge to wash all the windows in Seattle?
4. How would you find out if a machine’s stack grows up or down in memory?
5. Explain a database in three sentences to your eight-year-old nephew.
6. How many times a day does a clock’s hands overlap?
7. You have to get from point A to point B. You don’t know if you can get there. What would you do?
8. Imagine you have a closet full of shirts. It’s very hard to find a shirt. So what can you do to organize your shirts for easy retrieval?
9. Every man in a village of 100 married couples has cheated on his wife. Every wife in the village instantly knows when a man other than her husband has cheated, but does not know when her own husband has. The village has a law that does not allow for adultery. Any wife who can prove that her husband is unfaithful must kill him that very day. The women of the village would never disobey this law. One day, the queen of the village visits and announces that at least one husband has been unfaithful. What happens?
10. In a country in which people only want boys, 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?
11. If the probability of observing a car in 30 minutes on a highway is 0.95, what is the probability of observing a car in 10 minutes (assuming constant default probability)?
12. If you look at a clock and the time is 3:15, what is the angle between the hour and the minute hands? (The answer to this is not zero!)
13. Four people need to cross a rickety rope bridge to get back to their camp at night. Unfortunately, they only have one flashlight and it only has enough light left for seventeen minutes. The bridge is too dangerous to cross without a flashlight, and it�s only strong enough to support two people at any given time. Each of the campers walks at a different speed. One can cross the bridge in 1 minute, another in 2 minutes, the third in 5 minutes, and the slow poke takes 10 minutes to cross. How do the campers make it across in 17 minutes?
14. You are at a party with a friend and 10 people are present including you and the friend. your friend makes you a wager that for every person you find that has the same birthday as you, you get $1; for every person he finds that does not have the same birthday as you, he gets $2. would you accept the wager?
15. How many piano tuners are there in the entire world?
16. 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?
17. You have five pirates, ranked from 5 to 1 in descending order. The top pirate has the right to propose how 100 gold coins should be divided among them. But the others get to vote on his plan, and if fewer than half agree with him, he gets killed. How should he allocate the gold in order to maximize his share but live to enjoy it? (Hint: One pirate ends up with 98 percent of the gold.)

Answer 5

It depends on what job you are applying for. If its an Engineering job, you'll get some unexpected discussion regarding tools you know but barely use and they end up being very important in their operations - so with flags and switches.

Answer 6

I speak as someone who has done an onsite at Google (which I flunked :-P). Of course I'm unable to talk about specifics, but I can comment on two of the posts above.

I agree with Graphain's post linking to Steve Yegge's blog post. The stuff on data structures you must know is very important. I died because (in part, at least) I wasn't armed with that knowledge at the time.

I have not been asked a single question from the list Espo posted. That's not to say that you won't be asked them, so take my experiences with a sensible dose of judgement. :-)

Answer 7

(I will assume you apply as "Software Engineer".)

In my experience it is really important to know the Computer Science basics. Be really(!) fit with the fundamental algorithms and data structures (Trees, Hashes, Sorting, Binary Search, Graph Algorithms), algorithm design (Books: "Introduction to Algorithms", "Algorithm Design") and the O-calculus.

Why? Good algorithms matters more for Google then anything else, so their interview focuses on such topics. In environments like Google the O-calculus really strikes back because they have no small scale problems. In addition you should be able to write algorithms to know down in your favorite programming language on a white board.

Other topics like operating system basics (Threads, Processes, Mutexes, Semaphores, ...) and software engineering (Testing, Refactoring, ...) are also important (but probably not that important).

The hints from Stevey Yegge are great. But IMHO he downplays a bit what is expected and what is considered a good answer.

I think that the training questions in "Programming Pearls" (really nice book!) are remarkably similar to interview questions there. TopCoder really don't hurt, but try to find really good algorithms for the problems, even if you need a little bit more time.

And most important: Be relaxed. Enjoy the trip to the Google location (if you have an onsite interview) and the smalltalk with these extremely smart people.

Answer 8

I did well with most of the interviews there and got flown in for an onsite. The one thing I think I stumbled on was log math. I hadn't done any of this in a while and the final interviewer wasn't impressed. In hindsight, I should have applied for more of a user interface design position there since this is what I'm better at, but I was interviewing for more algorithm type stuff which I managed to pass in school but found very boring. Hope it helps!

Answer 9

Hi..if you are applying for a s/w engineer position,u can expect questions from the very basic level..Google emphasizes on ur basic skills and problem solving ability....they don't ask u to write complex programs with STLs....but they will ask the implementation level....

I prefer tanenbaum's text book for DS and Algorithms...try to solve as much exercises u can find....u should also practice ur analytical skills and always think from big picture...

definitely they will ask you to write programs and for that try to code any nasty stuffs which comes in your mind when u have free time...but be careful..they won't ask you any straight forward questions....think out of the box...be very strong in opertaing system concepts....emphasize on context switching and mode switching...they'll ask u to implement with minimum complexity...in a nut shell u emphasize on the following stuffs

0) Any programming language(be sure that u r the best in that) 1) Data structures and algorithms 2) Discrete mathematics 3) Analytical skills/Puzzles 4) operating system concepts and trouble shooting 5) Intermediate networking knowledge and protocol structures ultimately self confidence and willingness to say "I don't know"...

best regards