Here Are 10 Fiendishly Difficult Questions You’ll Have To Answer If You Want A Job At Google

By Adam | Internet
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Fancy a dream job at Google? Sure it sounds awesome with free gourmet cafeterias, massage rooms, nap pods, haircuts and onsite doctors available but what isn't awesome is the daunting interview process you'll have to go through. One hopeful, computer engineer Pierre Gauthier, with 37 years of coding experience, decided to share his interview experience in a recent blog post after he failed to give the "right answers". Here are the 10 questions he was asked:

  • What is the opposite function of malloc() in C?
  • What Unix function lets a socket receive connections?
  • How many bytes are necessary to store a MAC address?
  • Sort the time taken by: CPU register read, disk seek, context switch, system memory read.
  • What is a Linux inode?
  • What Linux function takes a path and returns an inode?
  • What is the name of the KILL signal?
  • Why Quicksort is the best sorting method?
  • There's an array of 10,000 16-bit values, how do you count the bits most efficiently?
  • What is the type of the packets exchanged to establish a TCP connection? 

Wow, they're pretty tough questions, I think even if you have a decent amount of knowledge in Computer Science, these questions still go very in depth, especially those that require a deep amount of knowledge about the Linux Operating System. Then again, if your applying for the position of "Director of Engineering” at Google, you'd expect the questioning to be very tough. I also think a company like Google have to ask tough questions due to sheer the number of candidates applying for positions there. I'm not completely sure Gauthier agrees though. In his blog, he posed the question "Is Google raising the bar too high or is their recruiting staff seriously lacking the skills they are supposed to rate?" What do you guys think? Do you think Google are expecting too much of people in interviews? Let me know in the comments below.