I should have been able to FN charge google for my interview process. Fuck you google... with failing me because I didnt have a college degree but was good enough to design several of your datacenters.
(/s of course)
(And I’m assuming you could, too!)
A common classic era Google question would be roughly "find an O(n) or O(logn) solution to a problem that most people would solve quadratically, and write pseudocode for your solution, handling important edge cases, while also intuiting the special details that your interviewer is fishing for (because they learned it in their PhD)".
So many people I knew at google were great math and science folks who ended up writing CRUD apps. Really depressing for them.
"How do you do a global replace in vi?"
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I blanked and said "I'd google it"
They said "thats the best answer"
(they also asked me what a type of comapny Google was... I said "Most think youre a search company, but really, you're an advertising company" 2008.
When I interviewed at Twitter in 2009-ish, they asked what type of company I thought Twitter was; "You're a global sentiment engine"
--
Go ghosted by both after saying I ranked super high on their metrics... (goog actually stated they were going to give me an offer, then called the next morning telling me they were rescinding offer)
IIRC this dates back to at least https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_(text_editor)
Haha, that was my third interviewer! Some random computational geometry problem. But it worked out for me as I happened to have read Preparata & Shamos as an undergrad.