Google used to be famous for asking prospective employees insane brainteasers — these are some of the best/worst.
According to Gayle Laakmann McDowell, the practice is basically non-existent these days…
But Impact Interview still has a list of many of the riddles interviewees were asked, and the jobs they were applying for. How many can you answer…
1. “How many golf balls can fit in a school bus?”
Job: Product Manager
2. “How much should you charge to wash all the windows in Seattle?”
Job: Product Manager
3. “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?”
Job: Product Manager
4. “Design an evacuation plan for San Francisco.”
Job: Product Manager
5. “Why are manhole covers round?”
Job: Software Engineer
6. “How many piano tuners are there in the entire world?”
Job: Product Manager
7. “How many times a day does a clock’s hands overlap?”
Job: Product Manager
8. “Explain the significance of ‘dead beef’”
Job: Software Engineer
9. “A man pushed his car to a hotel and lost his fortune. What happened?”
Job: Software Engineer
10. “You need to check that your friend, Bob, has your correct phone number…but you cannot ask him directly. You must write the question on a card which and give it to Eve who will take the card to Bob and return the answer to you. What must you write on the card, besides the question, to ensure Bob can encode the message so that Eve cannot read your phone number?”
Job: Software Engineer
11. “You’re the captain of a pirate ship… and your crew gets to vote on how the gold is divided up. If fewer than half of the pirates agree with you, you die. How do you recommend apportioning the gold in such a way that you get a good share of the booty, but still survive?”
Job: Engineering Manager
12. “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?”
Job: Product Manager
13. “You are given 2 eggs… You have access to a 100-story building. Eggs can be very hard or very fragile means it may break if dropped from the first floor or may not even break if dropped from 100th floor. Both eggs are identical. You need to figure out the highest floor of a 100-story building an egg can be dropped without breaking. The question is how many drops you need to make. You are allowed to break 2 eggs in the process.”
Job: Product Manager
14. “Explain a database in three sentences to your eight-year-old nephew.”
Job: Product Manager
15. “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?”
Job: Product Manager
