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> What these questions are are the standard set of pre-screening questions asked of a potential SRE IC or maybe TLM candidate. A SWE wouldn't be asked these questions, because they aren't related to the role. A SWE candidate still might get screened, but not with these questions.

A question on Glassdoor (for a Director position) is in the same vein: "How do you tell if a calculator is 8 bit or 16 bit."[1]

[1] https://www.glassdoor.com/Interview/Google-Director-Intervie...




> How do you tell if a calculator is 8 bit or 16 bit.

As someone who has reverse-engineered calculators, that question has me curious. You could implement the same external behavior regardless of what processor a calculator uses. So I can't see any way to determine the bit width. Is there an answer I'm missing? (Also the question ignores the many 4-bit calculators.)

(Of course you could open up the chip and take a look with a microscope, which I've done. But I don't think that's the answer they are looking for.)


Can an 8 bit calculator display/operate on numbers bigger than 2^8?


Yes, by operating on multiple bytes


In the same way you can have bigints in a 64bit system...


a) 2013, when they still asked brainteasers

b) That's a different question from this set about UNIX arcana, so it's not the same set

c) All of the other questions on that page are non-technical, so this isn't a question from a standard director set either. (It may be what 'DannyBee said, that people assumed they were being screened for a much higher position than they were actually being screened for.)




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