This wasn't an interview, it was a test. I had a similar experience with a startup. I was interviewing for a Marketing Communications Manager position. Essentially PR.
One of the unofficial interviewers (at 24 year old MIT engineer working as an email marketer) challenged me with the question "How many barbers are in San Francisco?" We proceeded to map it out the analytical process on the whiteboard. He wanted to see formulas to understand how I would arrive at the answer.
It was a stupid, impossible question. In a similar way to this girl's experience, he jabbed repeatedly critiquing my logic.
He wrote me later to explain that he posed the same question to his girlfriend, an MIT engineer herself, and she couldn't come up with an answer. Neither could he.
They offered me the job and I declined solely based on this guy and his misguided, silly behavior. I would have hated to work with him.
When a company misguidedly challenges potential employees in this way it hurts the quality of its hires. Sure, Google can afford to be picky but does it really need an engineer in a Product Marketing role? Perhaps for dev-facing apps but such an interview process is overall misguided and immature.
The "how many X are in Y" is also known as a "case study question." From what I understand it's a standard practice in interviews for consulting companies, such as Bain or McKinsey. I've never seen one in an interview, but friends of mine who took that route obsessed over them.
As your interviewer said, these questions are asked just to see how you will come up with an answer. The actual number hardly matters, so long as you can sell it to the interviewer. Pushing you is part of the process, as well, to see how you hold up "under pressure."
If you want to be uncharitable, this is much like what a management consultant does -- come in, get some problem from a troubled company ("How can we improve sales by 20% in six months?"), develop a strategy, and then convince the client that they should do it. The interview technique makes sense for that context because it selects for people who can pull this off.
Actually, for a PR role I don't think this question is such a bad fit. You will have to think quickly on your feet, answer hostile people, and come up with diplomatic, plausible answers to crazy questions ("why does your product not work with Slackware?"). The precise answer is of course important, since if you're wrong you will be caught, but how you react is more important.
Maybe you forgot to mention it, but how did you go from "discussing an intentionally impossible problem" to "misguided, silly behavior"? If your ego makes it upsetting to work with people who "jab repeatedly, critiquing [your] logic", or find it upsetting not being able to answer a question, that says quite a lot about what kind of work environment you'd be a good fit for.
mmmmm....yes and no. if you perceives critique negatively, that's a problem with your attitude. you'll never find a good place to work because you'll react poorly to natural differences and disagreements. if others are aggressive or negative that's a problem with them, especially if they're not interested in self-analyzing and learning to be mindful.
I disagree. I actually think the questions in both your example and google's was good in seeing how you approach a problem. The point is not the answer. It is the approach.
I can think back to meetings where questions of similar nature have popped up. You have guys that want the precise numbers and refuse to make any assumption of any sort. You have guys that throw stupid guesses and just want to move forward. You have guys that do a little bit of thinking to come to a quick but critically thought out answer. This seems like a good way to identify which category you fall in and whether your approach is a good fit for the job.
Isn't the sizing of markets something of marketers need to do, all day long? You can't blow $20k for a Gartner report every time you imagine a new market. You need to be able to make some ballpark estimates.
(Barbers cut the hair of half the population (the male half) around every two months. The population of San Francisco is about 750k. A haircut takes about 30 minutes, and about 50% of the time a barber is cutting hair. This gives about 8 cuts per day, or about 60x8 = 480 haircuts per every two months. So to service 750k/2 of the population you need about 750k / (2 x 480)) = about 781 barbers. Or roughly one out of a thousand people is a barber.)
I don't think this is such a terrible thing, although clearly this adversarial approach to testing ideas isn't for you, or everyone. Enrico Fermi used to challenge grad students with similar questions, the famous example being 'how many piano tuners in Chicago?'.
I don't think it's a stupid or impossible question, but one that seeks to establish how you go about estimating tricky things and thus identifying fruitful territory for more rigorous research. Let's walk through it, with the awareness that we're trying to refine our techniques of estimation rather than caring about the actual number of barbers.
'Barber' implies haircuts for men. This is good, because the number of hairstylists that cater to women depends on fashion, which is hard to quantify. On the other hand, hair cutting is more related to hair growth. There's about 3/4 of a million people in San Francisco. Roughly half of them are men, so we have 375,000 potential customers. Most men wear their hair short, off the ears. Of course some wear their hair long and have it cut very infrequently, while others like it much shorter, eg with a buzz cut and have it cut more often...but some of them may cut their own hair, since a buzz-cut isn't too challenging. I'm going to assume the number of hippies cancels out the number of close-cutters because San Francisco has a bit of a hippy reputation. So much for hairstyling.
OK, so I've postulated 375,000 men who average out to a 'regular hairstyle'. And I've postulated that a regular hairstyle means not having your ears covered, ie the old 'short back and sides'. While it's growing, you could comb it out of the way or let it cover the tops of your ears, but once it gets half-way down then you're either growing it out or it's time to visit the barber. How much hair is that? My ears are about 2 inches high, but I have small ears. 3 inches sounds pretty big though...I'll guess the average is 2.5 inches, so half of that is 1.25 inches. That's already pretty fluffy though...let's round it down to 1 inch. OK, so 375,000 men get a haircut whenever their hair has grown by more than an inch.
How long does that take? Hair grows at about 4 inches a year, so let's say 3 months. Which gives us 1.5 million male haircuts a year for the whole city. (we could have started calling the population p and the rate of hair growth g[h] and so on, but why bother, it's a chain of reasoning we're concerned with here). A haircut takes, what, 20 minutes? it could be faster, then again some want a more difficult style. So let's guess that there's half a million hours of actual hair cutting (including the bit with the sheet and the sweeping up etc) going on in a year in SF.
Now we're getting somewhere. How much does a barber work? I'd say 45 hours a week. Some barbershops open early for the business crowd, but then they're closed on Saturdays. Monday-Saturday seems reasonable, as does 2 weeks' holiday. So one barber could spend a maximum of 2500 hours per year cutting hair. Only, that seems a bit high. Sometimes you wait in line, but I don't usually think of barbers as busy flat-out most of the time. 30 hours of cutting and 15 hours a week of of waiting for a customer seems more realistic. So 1500 hours of haircutting per barber (edit: 1650, but who cares). And dividing that into half a million hours of cuttable male hair per year gives me 333, the number of people needed to cut all that hair.
At this point you can start arguing about whether someone that caters to both men and women is truly a barber, or whether women can be said to be barbers even if they only cut men's hair. If your answers to those questions are no and no, and we go with the stereotype of a barber as a man who only cuts other men's hair, then I'd halve these numbers and guess that the number of 'pure' barbers in SF is 75-100.
OK, so this is 10 minutes of my life I won't get back, but if I was going to market something specific to barbers then I now have a decent guess at the number of potential customers in my local metro area.
Of course, you could have just said 'pass me a copy of the Yellow Pages and I'll tell you'. So having done the above, I went and looked that up and got 131 results at http://www.superpages.com/yellowpages/C-Barbers/S-CA/T-San+F... ...with 2 or 3 cutters at each shop, that would suggest somewhere in the 3-400 range, but some of these entries are for Salons and some are in Daly city or Sausalito, not quite in San Francisco. Still not definitive, but not too far off either. Sure, there's a lot of guessing and hand-waving here...but the important thing is that I arrived at an estimate that roughly correlates with reality. In this case I was able to check that reality (by looking up the number of self-identified barbering businesses) but once you become adept at this technique you can use it for anything, and then get on with solving the problem instead of feeling stuck by a lack of information.
Maybe it's the traditionally educated engineering in me (I was trained as a mechanical engineer), but I don't see a point in this purely theoretical hand-wavy math. There are established ways for us to get good estimates of a great deal of information - including your hairdresser problem - that involve seeking out real data. Sitting in a void of zero knowledge and postulating wildly, even if it gets you in the ballpark, is wildly inefficient and I'd hate to be involved in it as part of a professional company.
A number out of your ass - regardless of how soundly backed with logic - is at the end of the day a number out of your ass. This isn't to say that all inference or estimation is bad - but rather that estimations done in a complete void of background data is practically useless.
A more concrete example: estimate the number of users our chief competitor has. I can go through this like a logic puzzle and come up with a number that has zero verifiability... or I can go look up relevant data (their page rank on Google, other available metrics on their site, etc) and arrive at a far better conclusion.
I agree with the GP that these exercises are pointless and unrelated to the job for which you are interviewing. As a traditionally educated engineer, my training teaches me not to guess whenever facts are available. Don't try to memorize and infer numbers - keep your references within reach at all times. An engineer who makes few assumptions about his data is one who makes fewer mistakes and costs less money in damage.
I don't disagree. If you actually asked me for informational purposes, I'd have started with the Yellow Pages and then go look for a trade association or something.
On the other hand, that's not always practical. Sometimes the facts aren't readily to hand or you have to make some decision that's time sensitive. For example, working in film production it's not so unusual to have to eyeball something and estimate your needs for time or material - you try to anticipate as much of that as possible in advance, but say you come to the set one day and the lead actor has fallen ill, so now you have to rearrange your shooting schedule on the fly...in which case it's not uncommon for a few key crew members to huddle, deliberate, and then split the difference rather than obsess over further optimization.
This isn't to say one should rely heavily on gut decisions, since that's likely to be self-defeating; on the other hand, you don't use a slide rule and protractor to drive.
"As a traditionally educated engineer, my training teaches me not to guess whenever facts are available."
Ah, but the most lucrative questions are about products not yet invented, for which there are few facts. They are lucrative because there is not yet any competition. If there were lots of facts available, ripe for the picking, then by definition the net margins would be terrible.
For instance, suppose you were a grad student at the MIT Media Lab in 1995. Does it make financial sense to join the work on an electronic ink product? The answer to that question could only have been derived from a series of guesses and wild deductions. You cannot just look up how efficient planar electroluminescent backlights are going to be in 10 years. Or how expensive and power-hungry non-volatile memory devices are going to be in 10 years.
For a research organization to invent and capture a new market, they have to be good at making and using wild guesses about the future. (Looking up answers is valuable too, but for different reasons.)
I think you're badly mistaking what I'm talking about with "looking up answers" - what I'm talking about is considerably more than that.
How efficient will planar electroluminescent backlights be in 10 years? That's a good question - and one we can make an educated stab at given the right historical data, the right experience in forecasting, and a little bit of plain luck. Heck, you're now talking about an entire field of mathematics and engineering in and of itself!
Compare this to the Google interview though - where they expect you to pull a number out of your ass, with no opportunity to consult historical data, no field experts to interview... no due diligence done at all. It is either an extremely poor approximation of real-life problem solving skills, or everyone at Google is recklessly cowboy and trying to deduce every decision ever by sheer will of logic alone.
Your logic is flawed (as is nearly every "solution" to one of these problems I've seen). The question wasn't "How many barbers should there be?" It was "How many barbers are there?" This is an important distinction as your approach shows the appropriate number of barber shops that can reasonably be operated and have no shortage of customers due to hair growth speeds. I would approach the problem from the opposite direction. How many distinct professions are there in San Francisco? What is the current population? What are the percentage breakdowns of those professions? At that point, you can easily get the number of people employed as barbers. Now, did they want individual barbers, or the number of barber shops? You then only need to infer the number of barbers per shop, rather than estimating a lot of data that isn't readily available.
You know, the University of Chicago still sounds like it.
The best answer would be, there are 14 haircutting places within the shopping disctructs of the U of C, and it is currently overzoned for hair currently, accroding to the maroon. Only two are true barbershops. It consists of three long blocks. Lets take the U of C landscape to be somewhat abnormal, and that there should really only be 7, of which 1 is a barbershop. There are about 24 neighborhoods in chicago. There should be 24 barbershops...ect ect....
There are a lot of ways to do this type of problem.
Say, 375,000 men and 25% of them men get a hair cut every 2 weeks taking 30 min, most men get far fewer haircuts but they bring the average down to about once a month.
Av workweek = 40 hours * 4 weeks = 160 men per barber sounds low call it 200.
Sounds like she is the "recite facts" type, rather than "quickly think critically" type. Google wants the second type of person, and it appears she is not that. So the interview process worked perfectly; she didn't get a job she wouldn't be good at, and Google doesn't have an employee that doesn't fit with them. I fail to see how this is a nightmare, other than that she'll have to work somewhere that makes her buy her own lunch.
Totally agree that she was not right for the job, but the process was a bit nightmare-ish :
“That’s all. Good luck with your job search.” The phone clicked-- I was stunned.
In my previous job I conducted a lot of interviews of an analytical style. Some people bombed so badly that is was clear well before the end that they wouldn't make the next round. In those cases, I used the remaining time to either talk to them about the career hopes/goals, or to explain how they could have better approached the problem (these skills are partly learnt..) to help prepare them for their next interview. The way I saw it was that they were expecting 30 mins of my time, so they would get it, even if they weren't up to the job. It a courtesy, and it's also self interest - burnt interviewees make a lot of noise on campus.
When I was 'senior' I never applied to McKinsey, because I'd heard so many horror stories about their interviews - I just didn't want to go anywhere near them. I landed a job with one of their main competitors and spent 5 happy years there...
I totally agree. A company gains nothing by being dismissive. I've interviewed at about 20 companies in the last 10 years, not to mention VC / Angel pitches. Only Google left a foul taste in my mouth. As a CS guy I've had dozens of analytical interviews and have largely done well with them. But the guy who interviewed me from Google acted as if he was doing me a favor. He was curt from the first moment and would sigh and groan if I asked for more specifics on a question. He too basically hung up on me.
i agree. i interviewed at Google and thought the whole process was lots of fun. i didn't have any complaints about the people. (i might be biased because i was offered a job; however, i didn't take it, preferring to work at a startup instead.)
Maybe, but I can't imagine they would be very upset by the interviewer continuing to take a little more of their time either. At the very least, it gives you the feeling that the interviewer fairly assessed you instead of dismissing you because of one flummoxed question. When I interview someone who quickly seems unlikely to pass an intervew, I try to use as much time as possible to make sure my initial impression was correct and the candidate just didn't get unlucky and/or just happens to be overly nervous. Some people are great employees but are bad at being interviewed.
The interview process in this case worked fine. But it's silly and probably causes them to miss a LOT of good candidates. It's measuring a subjects ability to think critically... quickly and while under a lot of pressure.
Is SPEED of critical thinking important? How many positions at Google require people to think on their feet? How many positions require them to be comfortable/effective talking to strangers on the phone (for this woman's position, it might be the case)?
Bottom line is that studies show over and over that "if you look at the marks that people get coming out of a hiring process versus the on-the-job marks they get in their first year in a job, they are actually not correlated at all."
With regards to your last point: I don't doubt that the vast majority of hiring processes aren't correlated with on-the-job success, but Google is definitely the kind of company that would strive for objective measures and to refine their process. They at least claim it's working. I think it was on the Stack Overflow podcast that I heard a discussion of Peter Norvig's remarks about this in Coders at Work. He evidently posted something similar online:
"Our interviews are more to do with practical problem solving, not with puzzles and tricks. Our interview scores actually correlate very well with on-the-job performance: we are doing quite well at hiring the right people, we believe, and we work hard at analyzing the process. Peter Seibel asked me if there was anything counterintuitive about the process and I said that people who got one low score but were hired anyway did well on-the-job. To me, that means the interview process is doing very well, not that it is broken. It means that we don't let one bad interview blackball a candidate. We'll keep interviewing, keep hiring, and keep analyzing the results to improve the process." http://www.mv-voice.com/square/index.php?i=3&d=&t=16...
It would be very interesting to know how Google measures on-the-job performance since you obviously can't talk about correlation without numbers backing it up. I seem to recall having read that on-the-job-performance is not as easily measurable than Norvig seems to imply but I guess that if they successfully managed to reach this Holy Grail they probably won't share the numbers, even less the methods.
Speed of critical thinking for simple questions like the $0.10 ad-click question probably is important. If someone can't figure out the answer to that one pretty fast, they're probably not going to successfully figure out really hard problems at all.
True, although I have to wonder if she couldn't have figured it out easily under less stressful circumstances. What's baffling to me is how anyone could think interviews are a good technique for identifying job talent. Many, many (most?) people perform FAR below peak under pressure and that sort of pressure is almost non-existent in most jobs. This isn't pro basketball here.
Apart from the arithmetic fail, I think she did more than well in the creative/copy part. In fact, I think she did more than well. She recognized the brand value, put the story edit in line with the brand/tagline and made a plausible copy on the spot in a situation that is far from normal for that kind of work. All in all, it depends for what she was interviewed for, but then again Google is not good at/famous for copywriting/advertising - they are a technical analysis company, not a creative one.
What's also important is that it was a phone screen: this also saved employees' time on interviewing the person and company's time on flying out, wining and dining the person.
I worked for Google for a few years, and did a lot of phone screens. Most of the people who I interviewed probably felt the same way as this lady. The process may seem brutal, but it is impossible to invite everyone in for an on-site interview, and the phone screen does a pretty good job of filtering out the definite nos (although I'm sure that some good candidates are rejected).
I could count the number of people who passed one of my phone screens on one hand (and I considered myself a fairly easy interviewer).
I can't stand talking to people from companies like Google, they're always so smug and judgmental like that.
Part of my decision to drop out of the job market and focus full-time on my company (to pretty reasonable success this year) is because I like being paid based on a judgement of my work/products, rather than some half-assed assessment of me as a person made in an interview.
> rather than some half-assed assessment of me as a person
> made in an interview.
Any judgement made in a 45-minute (or less!) interview is going to be half-assed. That's the unfortunate way of the world. How do you think people should interview?
(Genuinely curious; I do interviews, and I think I do pretty well, but it's difficult to honestly examine one's own methods without feedback.)
If I may interject, I think in most cases it's much, much better to use a network of connections rather than random walk-ins. You're much more likely to get someone that not only performs well, but also fits in well with your company's personalities.
If you have to interview strangers, I think it's good to inquire into their technical background until you have ample confidence in their technical abilities, and take the rest of the time to discuss career and company goals, personalities, hobbies, etc., in a lax and non-rushed manner. I'd invite the candidate back for a follow-up interview and talk more and then invite him to work out of your office for a few days (with pay, of course).
I think it's much better to have a relaxed and friendly decorum and perform a series of informal "interviews" because you'll learn a lot more about the candidate if he feels confident and open than if he's rushed to answer a bunch of silly logic puzzles and give diatribes on his five-year life plan.
If I may interject, I think in most cases it's much, much better to use a network of connections rather than random walk-ins. You're much more likely to get someone that not only performs well, but also fits in well with your company's personalities.
It is possible that this person is being interviewed by Google as a result of a referral by another employee within the Google, or even a referral from the hiring manager themselves.
Unless what you mean is that a hiring manager only consider people whom he and every other potential interviewer already know before the interview process even begins. The odds of ending up with such an arrangement at a place the size of Google, or even a place 1/100th the size of Google, seem insanely remote.
Someone on an interview loop at a large organization is bound to not know you from every other candidate who walks in the door. Even with phone interviews, odds are they call people based on factors entirely other than "do they know this person?" The best he may know about you is that some other person in the organization referred you, but it is not obvious whether they'll appreciate knowing this or be pissed off that their objectivity is now screwed. Some interviewers really prize trying to be as objective as possible in interviews, because interviews have a habit of being horribly imprecise anyway. But then, so do referral from J. Random Employee ("I have this cousin who's really good with computers; he helped me setup Outlook and everything. We should hire him a as software engineer.")
But then, maybe that is your point. If a company ends up at a size where they can't rely on connections, they're too big already.
I bet the commenter above would prefer to be judged on his accomplishments as an interviewer, rather than some half-assed assessment of him as a person made in a comment.
It wasn't any assessment of the commenter, but rather the cumulation of my experiences doing interviews and talking to folks from these companies. Still prejudiced, but you make me sound like a total dick. :)
Out of curiosity (I have no plans to apply to Google), what kind of criteria are used to identify prospective candidates? For example, does Google only look at the top 10% of academic performers and winnow from there, or sample across the board and then start filtering for critical thinking? I'm just thinking about the fact that many industry luminaries didn't bother to finish college, but rather stayed long enough to pick up some new intellectual tools and then started selling their ideas as soon as they had decided which way the wind was blowing.
How many industries luminaries would be good contributors at Google? Wozniak, who prided himself on building circuits with fewer chips than anyone thought possible?
These were just questions for a position as Associate Product Marketing Manager. During my senior-year interviews with Google for a Software Engineer position, there were 3 rounds, each getting increasingly harder, chock full of nothing but technical questions: some trivia (name all standard network port associations), some implementation (design a chat server), some theory (what is the big-O runtime advantage of doubling an array size upon copy over just adding new entries linearly), etc, etc...
Each time they said "this interview will take about 30 minutes," but each one ended up being around 1.5 hours.
It was grueling, but fun. I'm not sure what happened because I didn't hear back after the 3rd interview. It was at least a nice feeling to know that all of my classes in school had helped me with the answers.
Have you considered interviewing again (I'm assuming some time has passed)? I think its usually a pretty good sign when interviews go long. I think it might be worth your time. Feel free to email me if you'd like.
I have actually been contacted twice since then by Google for subsequent openings (once in the past couple of weeks!). I am currently working on my startup, but I will certainly keep this option open in the future.
'
“Say an advertiser makes $0.10 every time someone clicks on their ad. Only 20% of people who visit the site click on their ad. How many people need to visit the site for the advertiser to make $20?” I froze. The problem sounded easy but I didn’t want to cause an awkward silence trying to solve it.
'
The problem only sounded easy? Isn't this what you learn in 3rd grade? When you can't do this stuff you shouldn't be allowed near numbers.
Yeah, it's easy. When you deal with logic problems all day. Or if you're used to solving problems in your head.
Personally, I solved it easily in my head. But, I had to read the problem the first time, then read it again slowly getting all the numbers into the proper places in my head. An interview is a stressful place, so easy things can get a lot harder.
Yeah, I worked it out just as the interviewer explained it. $0.1 per click, 20 out of 100 visitors click, that's 20*0.1=$2.0 per 100 visitors. We need $20 dollars so we need 1000 visitors. This really is child's play. Honestly I think the pressure must have crippled her.
would it have been awkward to write down the equation and then solve it? keeping a legible notebook and writing documentation are even better than doing things in your head and spewing magic numbers. i frequently have reason to do back of the envelope sanity checks...no reason not to use an envelope or a notebook, though.
That might be more obvious to the interviewee if the interview were done in a room with a whiteboard. They could ask to use the whiteboard to sort things out. Over the phone it's possible for people to get the impression that they are supposed to spew and answer right away. It's just a matter of mindset though.
Rigorous interviews will increase the false negative rate, at the expense of false positives. It's part of the culture at Microsoft and Google and other companies.
I don't know why people are downvoting you. I can tell you that I've seen the same thing and having dealt with the fallout of bad hiring, I'd rather miss some good or even great candidates rather than hire someone bad. Edi: To clarify: I work at Google.
You always run the risk of hiring someone bad. Interviewing, particularly rigorous interviewing, is a game that doesn't map very well onto work itself.
That's why the true test of a hiring process is the firing process.
If you can get rid of people that can't hack it, rather than letting them gather as detritus in your system, you'll be far better off than if you simply pretend that you can actually avoid mistakes.
Rigorous interviews will increase the number of false negatives, but decrease the number of false positives. I think your wording doesn't make that clear.
When the cost of a false positive is high, e.g. a bad employee can be very expensive in terms of time and money before he is identified and fired if he is fired at all, then it is worth the cost of a few more false negatives to be more sure that you aren't getting false positives.
It seems that very often someone who is the victim of being a false negative will rail against the system and claim it is unfair. If you can get them to look at it from the other side they will often agree the practice is quite reasonable.
I liked the "quiz" question someone posted on the linked "Business Insider" article:
You work for a digital age media company who has already achieved superior market dominance in an industry rife with failure and turnover. Your company's stock, though depressed, still sells for multiples above its competition and the option pool is pretty full and limited.
The company's single main product continues to grow its revenues nicely but has failed at virtually all attempts to broaden its product line so it remains reliant on its single huge product which may come under government anti-trust action at some point in the future to say nothing of two leading competitors aiming to unseat it. It's only other breakthrough products are given away free or at nominal charge with no discernable profitable business model.
Is it a good career choice to join or stay with this firm even though they pride themselves on asking stupid quiz questions to gauge your intelligence and make you feel very special if you are offered a position?
Speculation is for investors. As long as you get your paycheck, who cares? (And "when" they stop giving paychecks, Google will look pretty good on your resume'.)
Why are people so upset about the "quiz questions"? Is it unreasonable for an employer to expect you to think? (Is the "right answer" ever the goal of these questions?)
I don't know why people are upset. I don't, however, think there's a category of "thinking" to which these questions provide insight. I use a completely different toolset when answering quiz questions than when I'm answering "real life" questions. "Railroad crossing watch out for cars, can you spell that without any R's" is a typical 'quiz' question that asks you to abandon ways we know people interact. Asking someone, "How many pounds of tonails are cut every year?" is asinine.
I'm her age. This is essentially a case question straight out of a consulting book. I'm out of practice for it. Way out of practice. Meanwhile, I'm scared stiff of applying for jobs because my entire class has gone crazy about how to behave, what to say, what is the right answer to questions like this. I know I'm not perfect already. I know I have work to do to get better. and the bAck of the evenvelop question is one of my weak points. And I know it.
First thing I discovered though from helping other people on other sorts of collaborative projects on the web:
Get paper for this stuff if you are out of practice, and ask to wait for an aswer while you write it down, and if you forget something, as to repeat. Always good to write somehting down- shows you are listening. She didn't.
Be a little more wild with your answer. Not over the top. But just a little. I got that last night from someone at McKinsey. Was talkign to a class of mine about the history of business. Someone asked. Don't be too much though.
And reach out about your humanness. Not everyone is perfect. If your weak point is Back of the envelope stuff, then it is your weak point.
Speaking of which, since I am taking my time (becuase I can't freak out any more, I just can't) How do I brush up on those questions? And that way of thinking. I'm good on the creative side with large data sets and how to sort out problems, but not on the calculations side...which sucks.
You sound like you're going to break down any minute. Seriously, please relax! If a company seriously cares about the exact wording of your answers, you obviously would not want to work there. Management consultancy is a load of stuff any intelligent and hard-working human can do, they just want to test your basic intelligence and reasoning and check to see if you seem like a sufficiently nice human. Don't sweat it that much, your live doesn't depend on what McKinsey thinks of you.
I realize that. I also don't want to work for McKinsey. I don't think management consulting would be a good fit. Really, I think I have too much of humorous subversive streak for that.
I realize I can do a lot of things with time and effort. I feel pressure on the time part, Overloaded. I'm doing a bit too much on top of that. I'm a little less that one week to my bachelor's critique in new media/internet art. We're a crazy bunch of folk, them artists. Long term I want to switch to learning coding, and haven't had the time to sit down and even think yet...
Or really apply for jobs yet. That's uhhh after next week, after I finish classes. When I know where I'm living/doing. That's normal for a college student though where I am...jumpy folk, mostly halfway through a very short midterm cycle...BA nearly got deleted, those sorts of things. still coming off of that sort of thing.
In engineering school, we got pretty familiar with BOEC (back of the envelope calculations), in some part to give a double check on calculations, and in other part (ahem) to double-check on slide rule calculations and exponent correction.
But that is a useful skill, particularly in conjunction with a problem-solving attitude which they repeatedly emphasized us to do.
And the book Innumeracy by Paulos gives examples of good problems to check with: "Is there a cubic mile of human blood in the world" and "How long would it take to move Mount Fuji" as a couple of examples.
It doesn't sound like a good sign if your latest math was as a freshman if you are looking for a software career.
This was for a marketing position though, not an engineering position. I wouldn't expect someone trained in marketing to be good at BOEC or be as analytical as an engineer.
She also bombed a middle school level math problem.
One question (paraphrased): $0.10 cpc, with a 20% of visits resulting in a click. How many visits needed to make $20?
After five painful minutes the annoyed interviewer gave me the answer...She made it sound so easy; I felt like a moron.
She is innumerate.
If I were illiterate, I'd probably describe an interview at McGraw Hill as nightmarish. "After five painful minutes of trying to sound out the words the annoyed interviewer read the sentence to me...She made it sound so easy; I felt like a moron."
Or she was just very nervous. Your cognitive abilities decline if you're put on the spot. Have you ever said something stupid while speaking in front of a group?
The girl goes to Syracuse, which is a somewhat selective University. She would not have gotten in if she couldn't do the math (her SAT scores simply wouldn't be high enough.)
This question would have been easy for me and actually would have probably boosted my confidence during the interview. But that's because I'm a quantitative person. Throw a question I was completely unexpecting though and I could be stuttering and saying stupid things. I'm sure there would be some questions or exercises the author could complete far more smoothly than I could.
Calling her innumerate (and making the analogy of her being illiterate and thus incompetent) for this slip makes me think you haven't been on many interviews yet.
Who cares about her SAT score (which someone can spend months preparing for) if she can not perform under pressure? It's not Google's job to make sure she can withstand the pressure of a stressful job (interview).
Google has interviewed tens of thousands of candidates in this manner. Other companies have interviewed even more, using roughly the same process. With all the preparation this girl put into her interview, I don't see how she possibly could have been surprised by those types of questions. The first piece of advice anyone will give you is that the final answer is not nearly as important as talking through the process you would use to solve the problem. Obviously she never even read that first piece of advice, because she blurted out a wild guess to the very first question. Don't let this happen to you!
Google's interview process isn't a nightmare. It's entirely typical. If you plan on interviewing for any job, you should spend a lot of time studying the interview process and how to excel in it. If you're interviewing for programming jobs, this course is an invaluable resource: http://courses.csail.mit.edu/iap/interview/
Read all the handouts 5 times, and you won't be caught off guard like this girl was.
Oh, please. Perhaps they care about pedigree and GPA for new grads, but what else do they have to go on? I'm 40, and they didn't seem to care at all where I went to school nor what my grades were. The interview was challenging, but a lot of fun (the good kind of challenging), and certainly not a "nightmare."
I agree. Whenever I read one of these articles, I feel like I should post my own story of how I interviewed at Google and it was completely reasonable, if expectedly rigorous. I really only had two complaints: 1) they sent me to lunch with a guy who works on AdSense, and at the time I was working at Yahoo on their Content Match system, so we had a pretty awkward time trying to figure out what we could talk about without disclosing anything confidential, and 2) it took a really long time after my interviews for them to actually produce an offer (maybe 4 weeks or so), although their recruiter did give me regular updates of what was going on in the process.
FWIW, they did ask me for a lot of awfully detailed information about my current and past compensation packages and what other companies I was interviewing with. I mostly declined to provide that information, and they didn't push it.
I wouldn't really say nightmare per se, although it probably felt like that at the time. She just wasn't very practiced at estimating and making reasonable assumptions.
Back when I was in my final year of uni I interviewed for a set of blue-chip graduate recruiters who threw similar questions at me. I distinctly remember sitting in a Data Connection office somewhere trying to work out how many petrol stations were in the UK. I was terrible. But there are ways to get better at this and it's really no secret that Google asks these kinds of questions. I think they reveal two things about the candidate - how good they are instinctively, and how well they prepare.
Obviously Google asks candidates who get past a certain point to sign a NDA, but there's still a surprising amount of information out there. I was recently helping a friend (and have previously helped an ex) with interviews and preparing for the logic and theoretical comp.sci. parts was actually quite a lot of fun. Maybe because I didn't have the pressure!
Correct. I'm here age, and for those of us who have to reteach themselves all sorts of math for a variety of reasons, BAck of the envelop questions are frightening under pressure. First thing you should do is take off the pressure and see if you can be collaborative with the person.b People tend to panic very easily.
The questions mentioned in the article don't seem particularly odious. They sound like standard "think-on-your-feet" case-based questions that management consultants and bankers also love. Demonstrating creativity and problem solving grit is more important than producing a correct number.
I also can't help but notice that some of the interview questions were confusing or misleading when taken into context with the other questions.
The engineer says that he got lost when she mentions ads might have a 25% click through rate but in another question the click through rate was 20%, as an example. She probably thought, but did not write that her earlier estimate would have been ok or acceptable which would be confusing given the engineer's reaction.
Also, if said question was meant to test reasoning skills and not a raw answer, then a wrong estimate for click through shouldn't "lose" anyone. After all, if you haven't worked in search or heard of google or the internet ad business internals, how would you know what the click through rate should be more like? Advertising is but one of many industries.
I think google needs to be a bit more careful about how they ask questions or at least have interviewers talk to each other. Probably too difficult since they all have other tasks and duties to do.
These seem like soft-ball questions all around. Phone screening is such a pain in the ass, I am surprised that more people don't have a timed web form or similar setup so we can avoid having to waste the hours talking to people that aren't going to make the cut.
> avoid having to waste the hours talking to people that aren't going to make the cut.
chicken/egg... how are you going to know that without talking to them?
However, to that end, could you just raise the bar on the resumes and also the subequent first-round phone screens to reduce the number of 2nd-, 3rd-round interviews? The Google application (for non-college recruits) is already extensive and probably acts as a weed-out mechanism for many people deciding to just apply on a whim.
I thought it was funny that the link she gave to "15 Google Interview Questions That Will Make You Feel Stupid" has wrong answers in the solutions. See if you can beat their answer for the two egg problem - Bonus prove your answer is actually the minimum possible.
"Everyone says your GPA doesn’t matter when you’re finding a job." Uh, maybe for a second job- but when you are still a senior in school your GPA is one (admittedly crude) measure of how well you were doing at your last occupation (student).
I agree, and am not trying to make fun of the original author. The hiring company is going to look at the most relevant experience you have- and in some cases it is going to be GPA.
I think it can certainly help if you have a good one - I certainly would have pointed it out had it been true in my case - but if it had been the decisive factor I would not have gotten the jobs I did. Just my anecdotal experience.
For an associate product manager position, it only gets harder.
I quite enjoyed the back of the envelope calculations during the early calls, as well as talking about interesting products I had encountered recently.
It got quite interesting on-site. I really enjoyed the first couple of days of interviews, which focused on design ("design a shopping mall"). The last day was still fun, but less enjoyable, as it involved coding on a whiteboard, estimating the computational complexity, and then improving its efficiency. Then I was asked to spec out the requirements for adding unit tests to a programming language.
I felt the interviews were fair and well-balanced, the main sticking point for me was the emphasis on GPA and academic history.
> I'm sorry but if you think that Gmail earns only
She qualifies it with "a real number?" comment and I think she was wondering if they wanted a "solid number"
> I suspect not at Google though.
I dunno but it's a big corporation now. Anyone can float through such a place without really working hard if they can find the right niche. I don't see why google would be magical or special about this.
My Google interviewer had a toothache. I didn't get an offer. Their recruiters are notoriously independent; not sure that's a good thing. I was actively sought out, but had no chance because the interviewer had a bad day.
Question: is it more important to keep out the bad ones but lose some good ones, or vice versa? (ie, what's the correct balance between false positives and false negatives?)
I've heard from several Googlers that false positives are orders of magnitude worse than false negatives. In reality, I think it's more clear-cut - there are those developers who know all about tries, algorithms, parsers, GC strategies, unit testing, OS level details, networking, etc., and those developers who know how to program in Blub for Blub libraries. For most positions, Google wants the former.
I am mystified that companies use interviews in hiring despite the overwhelming academic evidence that interviewing does not work,
I conjecture that what we are discussing is primate social behavior (yes, "monkeys in a tree") and social hierarchy in action. Of course we _are_ primates, so maybe it _is_ vital that Google hire enough "alpha males" or whatever.
I once came on interview with a very big company, a lady that interviewed me slowly began to become medieval and very angry - for no reason, so I got afraid of her and just walked away myself, for goodnes sake. A guy before her was friendly.
Non critical thinking people are not worse as they can have other strong skills like immagination or creativity or ability to understand user feeling or simply a lot of taste. I think that with this kind of interview Google is creating a monoculture inside the company. The effects may be the fact Google has some problem pushing web services where technological strenght can not do a real difference.
Her last answer really did her in, I think. She said she was "wishing [the number of graduating seniors] was higher" since she was amid a job search. That would mean more competition for jobs. That indicates a lack of critical thinking skills.
I think the gmail answer would have sunk her too. Google is an advertising company -- 1/4 (25%) clickthrough on Gmail ads (not even search) is just crazy. People click search ads because they're looking for something, Gmail ads probably get an order of magnitude less click through (people aren't in gmail to find new things). For someone applying to an advertising company, she needs to know their basic business model and assumptions.
If she thought about her own usage, she'd realize that it was an insanely high number (had she ever clicked on a single gmail ad, let alone 25% of them?).
Exactly. This was the main point. It's just so off. If you don't care enough about a company to understand the absolutely most basic reasoning behind their cashcow product, why should the company be interested in hiring you?
It was a joke. I think what doomed her more than anything was a lack of comprehension skills from the first interviewer, and a lack of humor from the second.
I realize that she was under some pretty severe stress, but a marketing manager that thinks gmail earns ~$70,000 a day? Or that each user will click on seven ads a day?
“Google places four ads per e-mail opened in Gmail. Advertisers get to pick their click-through rates, which can be as little as $0.05...Say each G-mail user opens seven new e-mails a day. They would see 28 ads. If they click on ¼ of those ads, then only seven ads are clicked."
Gmail probably has something like 150 million users, so her figure of 7 ads clicked per user at a minimum of 5 cents a click would result in 52.5 million dollars a day. At some point she should have realized the void between her new analysis and her original $70,000 guess. The whole point of the question is to examine your analytical and estimation skills. The fact that she didn't notice that she was moving towards and answer 750 times the size of the her last one says a lot.
What surprises me is the reasoning path she took (ie estimating customer behavior). I'd have tried to guess how many servers they need for that (uuuuh...100,000?) and how much they cost a year ($1000 each, $100m?) and what's an acceptable profit margin (20%? So about $300,000/day in earnings).
Then again you could figure Google makes about $5 billion a year in profit, say a tenth of that comes from gmail, and the profit margin is 10%, suggesting ~$15m a day in earnings (not profits) which is off by a factor of 500 from the above. That sounds a lot more likely.
To be honest, I think the approach she took is a lot more reasonable. The whole point of building a product business is that your revenue scales differently from your expenses. Your example has an implicit assumption that Google is somehow artificially regulating demand so they can keep their profit margin at 20%. The profit margin on Gmail could be 5% or 99%. Who knows?
No argument here. The only reason I went down this road was because I figured any guesses I made about actual click rates of users would be mostly based on a sample of 1 and thus even more laughably off than guessing the minimum viable earnings...of course, this is why one should never be ashamed to say you don't know. It's one thing to speculate and exhibit your thinking process, but when you start getting confident about it it's all too easy to slip in bullshit artistry, and I'm sure they'd rather avoid that trait in hiring.
From the Googler: “You lost me at the ‘only clicking on ¼ of the ads’ comment. Let’s move on.”
Yes, indeed. Someone who has a slightest clue about the whole stuff just can't say 1/4 of users will click an ad in Gmail. I am sorry for her, but that is just so off...
I know it's anecdotal, but I've never clicked on an ad in gmail. (to be fair she said that all users will click on 1/4 of the ads presented to them, not '1/4 of users will click on an ad')
It says something about her current estimation skills. Are these skills she is often going to need in marketing?
But overall, it was probably a good thing for her not to go there. Sounds like Google has a particular mindset (one that reminds me, anecdotally, of stories of Microsoft 15-20 years ago), and she wouldn't fit there. I'm not at all convinced that means she couldn't be effective at marketing somewhere else, though.
Some parts of marketing are about judging the bang for your buck and allocating finite resources among the various options. It sounds like that's what they wanted.
On the other hand, specific data about actual click-through rates, number of users, number of ad impressions, etc. would be required input to any reasonable approach for such judgement. Data, that is, not guesses. Estimates without ballpark cultural knowledge are also just guesses.
For my own part, never having bought Google ads, nor having displayed them, I would rather estimate no more than 1% of people would click on them no more than once per day. That's probably because I'm cynical about ads, use AdBlock, would rather rely on search and recommendation for finding products, and so do my peers. I don't have a good pool of knowledge for answering this question in a way that would be accurate, no matter what my estimation skills are.
You'll have hard data on your own products, but you can still only make guesses about your competitors' products, your complements, and other variables in the marketplace. Joining a company doesn't eliminate uncertainty, it just shifts the uncertainty from that company's numbers to everyone else's numbers.
A lot of data is kept strictly confidential; unless there's a mole somewhere, a market research firm isn't going to have it. Many of these estimates are made by applying data that you know about your own company's operations to public information available about your competitors.
To be honest, a moderately intelligent 5th grader could have answered that question about the 10 cents per ad. I know that math isn't her field, but on some level one is expected to be well rounded.
I've taught some very intillegent third graders. No. No they wouldn't have under the time constraints and pressures. People blank with pressure. The first thing the interviewer should do is lay off the pressure not turn it on. Seniors and Out of Job People tend to freak.
First easy thing to do which isn't describe. Tell the person to sit down with a pen and paper. And then talk about the why and how. That was the demeaning part. Antoi-collaborative, very scary.
People blank with pressure. The first thing the interviewer should do is lay off the pressure not turn it on. Seniors and Out of Job People tend to freak.
Even at Google, a job is not a vacation. Wanting to hire people who react well under pressure is completely valid.
The mistake, which is not at all unique to Google, is to think that "high pressure interrogation at a job interview" is usefully similar to the kind of pressure that might occur on the job. For some jobs it will be. For many others, it's completely different.
Compare these scenarios: "QA just found a huge, unexpected performance problem in this server application and no one knows what's causing it. The application goes live in 48 hours and you and your team have until then to make it handle ten thousand times as many users as it does now." vs. "You just landed after a 10-hour flight and will be meeting a major potential customer in 30 minutes. TSA blew up your laptop because it looked suspicious and the airline sent your luggage to Albuquerque so instead of a carefully-prepared presentation all you have are a couple index cards with vague notes about the product. If you don't make a sale, your company will be bankrupt in a week."
No job is a vacation: I've done work under pressure as well for both school and other land.
Google is not going to be bankrupt in a week. If your interviewer is really smart, do the Seth Godin thing: freelance the person for a few weeks, or offer them a real life case they are currently working on to see what that person is actually going to do.
One of the ways I figured out I would make a horrible teacher was I worked as a teacher. I really believed and worked very hard as a teacher. Ultimately, I needed a more collaborative environment, and I was stressed out because I met some really smart kids who were flunking half of exams on purpose when I confronted them about it. They would not work with me to fix these skills in third grade, particularly when there were background issues going on, and I was not the primary teacher. I found it not appropriate for me. I found that really high pressure, and not appropriate for me. Meanwhile, I know I will stay up all night on my own unpaid looking for affordance of different websites and how they can be applied for different business reasons. There you go? That seems to be appropriate for me. I just wish I knew more people in that field, and I wish I had the time to learn to code (after first round BA critiques....)
Interviewers need to sit down and know what is the pressures of the job, Half that interview would not have helped her at all. Furthermore, It is can I work with that person on the job, and help me and her reach a goal under pressure. That's a reasonable expectation. Very reasonable.
There're a couple parts to your comment. Yes, some third graders could do that no problem, even under the time constraints and pressure. I certainly could - I think I could actually have done it faster in 3rd grade than I could now. It's just like a math test or math competition, and good students have no trouble getting perfect scores on a math test even under intense time constraints (< 1 min/problem) and intense pressure ("If you don't ace this quiz, you'll never get into Harvard and then your life will be wasted.")
The second point of your comment is legit - this sort of time/pressure constraint isn't really representative of the workplace as a whole. Nobody should have someone hanging over them making sure you do your math right in under one minute - you certainly don't at Google. The interviewer probably should've tried to make the candidate feel a bit more at-ease.
But the sort of quick estimation skill necessary for these interview questions is really important. There've been countless meetings when someone (often me) has proposed a solution and I've done some quick mental math calculations only to find out that it just won't work. It's really valuable to get those calculations done in a minute so that you can brainstorm new ideas, rather than waiting until after the meeting when you probably just won't do the math at all.
And this is something that I really wish schools taught more of. Being able to get a quick, mostly-right-but-slightly-wrong answer, and being able to tell what ways your answer is wrong, is probably more important than being able to come up with exact answers or parrot back the formulas you supposedly memorize.
That and how to work with people to get to the answer.
I would want to work out that problem with someone. For that math problem right:
lets ignore the 20 people problem (aka 20%) right now and pretend that all the people who visisted clicked. for every 100 people who visit, they now get 1 dollar (it was ten cents) before). in order to get $20 if a hundred people visited for every dollar, you would need
20,000 people.
One problem, they need to click. and only 20 people click per 100 people. so in order to really make that money, you would have to multiply again by 20. I would take the 2s out and start counting 0s because I would get confused at this point.
400,000 people. I think. I may have screwed up the 0s. But If I didn't have a chance to slow down and write down the problem I think I would have screwed that up badly. I'm not sitting around and doing those math problems all the time...
> The first thing the interviewer should do is lay off the pressure not turn it on. Seniors and Out of Job People tend to freak.
If I was at a job interview and was asked these sort of puzzles, I wouldn't feel under pressure. Instead I'd think "Cool, I like solving puzzles! And I'm good at it too so this is a chance to make a good impression." Maybe Google are looking for potential employees with that attitude?
I could see having trouble answering something like this over the phone - especially if you have a bit of math phobia. That being said, Google was probably not the best match for her. Her guess at clickthrough rates was also kind of painful.
One of the unofficial interviewers (at 24 year old MIT engineer working as an email marketer) challenged me with the question "How many barbers are in San Francisco?" We proceeded to map it out the analytical process on the whiteboard. He wanted to see formulas to understand how I would arrive at the answer.
It was a stupid, impossible question. In a similar way to this girl's experience, he jabbed repeatedly critiquing my logic.
He wrote me later to explain that he posed the same question to his girlfriend, an MIT engineer herself, and she couldn't come up with an answer. Neither could he.
They offered me the job and I declined solely based on this guy and his misguided, silly behavior. I would have hated to work with him.
When a company misguidedly challenges potential employees in this way it hurts the quality of its hires. Sure, Google can afford to be picky but does it really need an engineer in a Product Marketing role? Perhaps for dev-facing apps but such an interview process is overall misguided and immature.