Sadly, being the fastest of your friends to find skateboarding monkey videos doesn’t make you a professional Googler. But your chances of being employed by the search engine giant just got a little bigger – they just announced they’re taking on another 2,000 workers. Do you have what it takes?
Let’s be honest, probably not.
But stay with us here. Pretend you’ve got an extremely padded resume, an Ivy League degree, a high GPA (Google reportedly cares about grades even well out of college), and just to round you off, a charming smile and a wealth of creativity. Can you seal the deal by answering some of the following questions, all from actual Google interviews?
1. There’s a latency problem in South Africa. Diagnose it.
2. Why are manhole covers round?
3. How long it would take to sort 1 trillion numbers? Come up with a good estimate.
4. 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!)
5. How many lines can be drawn in a 2D plane such that they are equidistant from 3 non-collinear points?
6. How many golf balls can fit in a school bus?
7. 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?
8. How many piano tuners are there in the entire world?
9. Mike has $20 more than Todd. How much does each have given that combined they have $21 between them. You can’t use fractions in the answer. (Hint: TRICK! TRICK!)
10. Given a box of pencils with different colors, design an algorithm to find the duplicate pencils with the same color.
If you rattled off answers to these, nice work, brainiac. Google might have a chair with your name on it. That’s great news for you, because the California-based company is repeatedly named one of the best places to work (HELLO, free snack bar and massages!) and employees are getting a 10% raise next year.
But if you’re anything like us and had a self-esteem meltdown before Googling the answers to these questions, well, congratulations, Google. You win again. You always do.
See TIME’s slideshow of Google Doodle stories.
[via Reuters]