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They still ask silly questions. It's almost like Jeopardy for Nerds.

* Convert decimal 11 to binary.

* How many bits are in Unix permissions.

* What does set UID mean.

* How do you rm a file named -f

* How are hard links different from soft links

* What does const mean

* More and more Jeopardy for Geeks questions

It was like a Unix/C trivia game. No reasonable person would name a file -f (but that's beside the point)...it's just fun thinking of all the ways you could remove it if you ever had to.




Funny, I got those sort of questions on my first phone screen, and I called them "pulse-checkers". As in, checking the candidate has a pulse and hasn't blatantly lied on their resume.

I would expect anyone who's been through a CS101-level class to do small decimal<->binary conversions in their head, and anyone who's administered a UNIX system to know how to terminate an option list.


They may have been considering you for a "site reliability engineer" position, which requires knowing these types of things.

I've been involved in ~100 Google interviews and I've never seen questions like this in a SWE interview.




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