[minimax]

I've interviewed with Google a couple of times over the years and the interview questions are usually of the form "you have X data in such and such format, and we want to answer question Y as efficiently as possible." Then you have to puzzle out the algorithm, answer questions about its asymptotic complexity, and then whiteboard the code.

Sometimes the questions feel a little bit gimmicky in that they aren't really representative of what software developers spend most of their time doing. I understand that one guy at Google had to come up with a clever algorithm to figure out a snippet to use in the search results, but that can't be what the thousands of developers at Google are doing all day.