Google Interviews

Listed below are sample of Google interview questions. OCTs are not expected to know the answers to the Google questions – (or even understand them!), but you can help the interviewee by thinking through how they would go about answering the question. Encourage interviewee to get together with their friends, contacts who have interviewed with Google/work for Google, those with industry expertise to practice answering these questions.

For a complete list of Google Interview Questions: http://www.impactinterview.com/2009/10/140-google-interview-questions/

Google Interview Questions: Product Marketing Manager

Why do you want to join Google?
What do you know about Google’s product and technology?
If you are Product Manager for Google’s Adwords, how do you plan to market this?
What would you say during an AdWords or AdSense product seminar?
Who are Google’s competitors, and how does Google compete with them?
Have you ever used Google’s products? Gmail?
What’s a creative way of marketing Google’s brand name and product?
If you are the product marketing manager for Google’s Gmail product, how do you plan to market it so as to achieve 100 million customers in 6 months?
How much money you think Google makes daily from Gmail ads?

Google Interview Questions: Product Manager

How would you boost the GMail subscription base?
What is the most efficient way to sort a million integers?
How would you re-position Google’s offerings to counteract competitive threats from Microsoft?
How many golf balls can fit in a school bus?
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?
How much should you charge to wash all the windows in Seattle?
How would you find out if a machine’s stack grows up or down in memory?
Explain a database in three sentences to your eight-year-old nephew.
How many times a day does a clock’s hands overlap?

Google Interview: Quantitative Compensation Analyst

What is the yearly standard deviation of a stock given the monthly standard deviation?
How many resumes does Google receive each year for software engineering?
Anywhere in the world, where would you open up a new Google office and how would you figure out compensation for all the employees at this new office?
What is the probability of breaking a stick into 3 pieces and forming a triangle?

Google Interview: Engineering Manager

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?

Google Interview: AdWords Associate

How would you work with an advertiser who was not seeing the benefits of the AdWords relationship due to poor conversions?
How would you deal with an angry or frustrated advertisers on the phone?

Google Interview Questions: Software Engineer

Why are manhole covers round?
What is the difference between a mutex and a semaphore? Which one would you use to protect access to an increment operation?
A man pushed his car to a hotel and lost his fortune. What happened?
Explain the significance of “dead beef”.
Write a C program which measures the the speed of a context switch on a UNIX/Linux system.
Given a function which produces a random integer in the range 1 to 5, write a function which produces a random integer in the range 1 to 7.