[hfdgiutdryg]

Google loved asking questions relating to the square-cube law. Like "you're shrunken down to the size of a dime and placed in a blender that's going to start in thirty seconds, what do you do?"

From what I gather, this is covered in required curriculum in schools like Berkeley, Stanford, MIT, etc. I've never heard of it in my life, and I was one of the top two in my CS graduating class.

IMO, this boils down to cultural bias, plain and simple. "We hire people just like us."

[kamaal]

Those questions are no longer asked. Most questions these days come from sites like leetcode, hackerrank and other online judge sites.

These companies now specialize in creating online tests. Where in you will have to enter a working program, which takes input through stdin, and has to print output to stdout. There are typically a huge range of tests your program has to pass. Several of those tests are to check if your program completes in time. And yeah, you write the program in a stipulated period of time.

Most questions go along the lines of dynamic programming. Mostly because for other questions, there is often a solution you can come up with. But for DP ones there is often a 'unique trick' involved with nested loops. And other ones are often bit manipulation types, where you get strange and interesting results by doing some tricks.

So you have to learn all possible algorithms. Which means you have to spend hours everyday learning every new problem/solution posted on those forums. Apart from this you also need to good C++ skills. I often see solution submitters in Java and Python laugh in the comments, commenting how their solution is just a Java equivalent of the C++ code, but just won't complete in time for a test case to pass. That also means learning a lot of C++ important to go through these tests.

These days getting good at interviews is a full time job.

I often have this thought. If you are really good at interviews you should waste no time in a company, building stuff and writing software. Your whole life must be dedicated to finding the next best paying job.

After all that's what you trained for.

[hinkley]

Before this people (like Microsoft) used to ask riddles. Now, I'm pretty okay at and enjoy riddles, and ridiculously good at multiple choice tests. Bits of this come out in how I approach troubleshooting and debugging.

The last place I interviewed at that did riddles ended up offering me the job, but I teased them even before they asked their riddles about how it wasn't a good interview technique. I could kind of tell they were thinking "oh boy, another guy full of excuses for why he's not gonna pass the interview process". Second riddle, I started talking and had the answer within a single sentence. No pauses, no sentence fragments. Now I had their attention.

Since it was a rapidly growing company I was in the interview pool within three or four months and it took me maybe six months after that to convince all but one person to stop using riddles for interview questions.

Point is, if you disagree with an interview technique but can manage to get through that filter anyway, you owe it to the rest of us to say something. Apply some peer pressure whenever you can.

[UncleMeat]

Google doesn't ask these anymore.

Having gone through one of the mentioned schools, this material also never came up even once.