Are You Smart Enough to Work at Google?

I found this to be an entertaining and informative read about the riddle-type questions that are now so popular in job interviews. Some of the advice offered could give you ideas on how to answer such questions if you are faced with them during an interview. Importantly, it could help you better structure your thought process and demeanor when tackling such interview questions. However, this book alone would probably not help you get a job at Google or anywhere else - riddles or not.The most interesting thing I found in this book is the admission that other companies have adopted riddle questions because they are trying to be more like Google. However, such interviewers usually don't understand the reasoning or objectives behind Google's riddle/mathematical problems and therefore a worthy response to a riddle asked at Google may get you different results at other companies.I had fun comparing my answers to the riddles to the answer key in the back of the book, but I believe that it has only made me marginally better as an interviewer. I still think that getting hit with a riddle during an interview at any company makes your success more of a crap shoot.

I guess I am not smart enough to work at Google! But more importantly after reading this book I would not want to. Is Google an advertising company or a technology company? The questions Google asks on interviews (if this book is accurate) have very little to do with work and perhaps are designed to stroke the ego of the person asking the questions. Like all things it is far easier to ask a cleverly worded question than to answer it. Nevertheless the questions and the suggested answers are quite interesting and entertaining. In the end I guess the book leaves you with the thought that if Google is looking for creativity and the suggested interview questions are designed to hire creative people then it looks like it is not working out. Google remains a "one trick pony" and is a company with a search engine and no other real products to speak of. Perhaps it is time to go back to the drawing board!

This was a very interesting book. I am a fan of puzzles and open ended questions and this book was loaded with them. I particularly enjoyed the reasoning behind asking such questions in an interview and how as others have copied Google and that has been lost. An excellent read for anyone who is job hunting in a super competitivve market as well as anyone who likes a challenge. Note: I read the kindle version of this and found it a little challenging till I got the hang of it. Not the Kindle itself (I love mine) but looking up the answers and then getting back to where I was reading, confused me at first.

I really wish this book didn't have the tantalizing (and very misleading) title. It's basically a book of brain teasers that are very loosely associated with Google or other tech firms. As background: I *did* read the entire book and have also interviewed at many tech firms and startups for Software Engineering positions. Including navigating through many difficult interviews at Google to receive an offer from them and speaking with *many* fellow engineers who have also interviewed at Google. So this review is from the perspective of software engineering, not sales or the many other (important) positions that exist at Google but aren't at the core of its business.With an interview at Google imminent, I purchased the Kindle edition of the book on a whim to help study. It mostly plays on myths of what the interview questions are like at Google, i.e. "Trick Questions, Zen-like Riddles, Insanely Difficult Puzzles, and Other Devious Interviewing Techniques..." Unfortunately if you use this as a study guide for a Software Engineering position, it's going to waste your time. Let me say that again in another way: this book will not help to prepare you for a Software Engineering interview at Google. In fact it might be detrimental because you'll spend valuable time and brain cycles working out the (fun!) brain teasers in this book rather than brushing up on the algorithms and CS fundamentals that are so much more important.(As an aside: I will say that despite the ban on brain teasers at Google, I *was* asked a brain teaser on one of my last interviews. Out of 8 interviews and well over 20 problems, it was only 1, though. And it isn't in the book.)Read this book if you want to read fun brain teasers and work through challenging problems. The problem descriptions are good and the explanation of the solutions (including frequently working from the "easy" answer through to the "best" one) is very good for non-technical people to read. For software engineers, particularly reasonably experienced ones, the explanations can definitely border on pedantic and overly obvious. There's also some awkward use of technical terms that make it clear it's not written by an engineer. For non-technical people, however, it's written in an accessible style with good humor that will likely add to the fun. The problems are frequently legitimately tricky no matter who the audience is, but again, they're not the types of things that are asked at Google. It's a good thing to read on the subway to/from work -- problems are bite-sized, so you can knock one or two off during the ride and pick up where you left off.I saw an exchange of comments between the author of this book and the author of "Cracking the Coding Interview" on a couple of reviews. For what it's worth, the author of "Cracking" is more accurate from my perspective -- and her book is far, far better at preparing for a software engineering interview.

An interview question at Apple: What happened in 2001? Hint: 9-11 is not the answer they're looking for. They want to hear it's when the iPod was invented, or the date of the first Apple store. At Goldman Sachs, they want to see whether you know the firm's latest stock price. At Nordstrom, it's all about a basic black dress. The book is an often funny survey of the corporate world, and about the many good and bad attempts to identify the smartest employees in the shortest time.I saw an article in Bloomberg about this book and was curious because I did an interview at Google and did get a question similar to one there. It's not all about Google, it's something like a blend of a New Yorker piece on the trend of challenging questions and a Martin Gardner book.Bottom line: If you love problemsolving, as I do, this book is a natural. If you're looking for a job and aren't expecting a simple cheatsheet, it's valuable background.

I am enjoying this book, if you like puzzles then its a bit of a laugh.I'm disappointed though that some of his solutions are a little off the mark:Q. Horse race: Given 25 horses, and you have a racecourse where you can race 5 horses at a time, how many races do you need to find the top 3 horses.In his answer to this, the author shows it can be done in 7 races, but does not explicitly explain why it can't be done in 6, so doesn't quite answer the question.Q. two men meeting after 20 years, one has 3 daughters whose ages have product 72 etc etcIn his solution, the author gives the prime factors of 72 as: 2, 3, 3 and 4???? 4 is not prime, so this is sloppy.He then lists the possible combinations, but misses at least one combination - this could matter, but luckily he still gets to the right answer.Q. If all families in a country plan their families as follows: "carry on til we get a boy, then stop", what will the male:female ratio be in the resulting population?The author goes into long, complicated detail by splitting up into the various cases of family: B, GB, GGB, etc etc when this is not necessary at all: The answer is that, as long as no one aborts fetuses on the basis of sex, then the ratio will be just as it would if families did not have that strategy. He also makes a slightly incorrect assumption: Namely that the proportion of M:F is exactly 50:50. In reality, the ratio for live births tends to be very slightly more girls than boys (the ratio at conception is likely to be 50 50, but live birth ratios are very slightly different to that). 50 50 is pretty close.Q. Desert island football, the only available coin for the toss is biased.A better answer than the "google" and "microsoft" ones? Captain A hides the coin in one hand and asks captain B to guess left or right.

As others have said this book is designed for people that loving solving puzzles, and especially if they have a good background in mathematics as many of the puzzles require mathematical equations. I would say this is a book that you dip into rather than read from cover to cover. It's a good book to take for example to break up the boredom on long journeys. Only some of the puzzles are actually lateral thinking, the rest require some paper and a pen to really work them out. The author even tells if you were asked certain questions what to write up on the whiteboard in the interview room to impress the interviewer.

I quickly discovered that I may not be Smart Enough to work at Google in the sense of how they test, but I did find the journey to discover that fascinating

Some really interesting questions (a lot mathematical/programming themed as you might expect), book is full of them, quite a lot which I had not come across before. I actually thought the "size of the fly in the blender" question at the start is not very representative of other questions, but is definitely a good way to hook you in.

Book is extremely entertaining and gets you to think. It has an abundance of examples and a review of how work is carried out in larger corporations with a focus on creativity (not only Google).Definitely a fantastic read.