Pierre Gauthier, a computer engineer who set up his own tech company 18 years ago, has published a blog post detailing all the questions Google asked him during an interview for a director of engineering role at the company.
Writing on Gwan.com, the tech worker explained that he recently had a phone interview with a Google recruiter for the role in which he was tested on his knowledge of coding and engineering.
The call started off well but as the interview progressed, Guathier got an increasing number of questions wrong. His frustration grew as he tried to discuss the answers with the Google recruiter only to find that the recruiter wanted the exact answer in the test book even if alternative solutions were better.
“As I qualified for the interview but failed to pass the test, this blog post lists the questions and the expected answers,” wrote Gauthier in the blog post. “That might be handy if Google calls you one day.”
At one point, on a question about how to most efficiently count data, he suggests a method that might be faster than the answer the recruiter wants, but the recruiter rejects it, saying, “that’s not the point of this test.” The conversation continues:
Me: what's the point of this test?
Recruiter: I have to check that you know the right answers.
Gauthier went on to get the last six highly technical questions wrong and kill any chances he had of getting a job at Google. The questions look difficult, with plenty of technical terms that will be completely unfamiliar to anyone that hasn't studied computer science.
In his post, Gauthier also provides a running commentary on the test. His thoughts range from, "typical computer science (1st year) lectures" to "how long is this crap going to last?"
At the end of his post, he jokes: "My score is four on ten, that's better than my best Google pagerank** ever!"
Read the full post here.
