Google's “Director of Engineering” Hiring Test

The problem is Google doesn't need you. Google gets onefinity applications per day. If they shave %90 percent of cold applicants this way then they will not hurt for more applicants. A company that large will gain it's best participants by reference.

-----------------------------------------

my interview with google was very short.

them: what is 2 ^ 37?

me: can I use a calculator?

them: no

me: then we are done here.

Did they want an exact answer? Getting closeish without a calculator is not too hard: 2^30 is about a billion, so 2^37 is about 128 billion.

You don't need a calculator for that, it's: 10000000000000000 ...

(binary obviously)

I could say pretty quickly it's somewhere around 12 billion decimal but an exact answer on paper would take me some time...

The amazing thing is that everyone thinks they're hiring the best people while it's pretty much never true. Generally speaking a place that pays well, treats people well and has challenging work will have better people than a place that doesn't and the hiring practices ability to filter beyond that are negligible.

OOPS 128 billion :)