Google, Facebook, IBM and Others Weird Job Interview Questions in 2010

by Nicholas Kolakowski

“How many basketball[s] can you fit in this room?”- Asked for a people analyst position at Google

“Given the numbers 1 to 1,000, what is the minimum number of guesses needed to find a specific number if you are given the hint ‘higher’ or ‘lower’ for each guess you make.”- Asked for a software engineer position at Facebook

“If you had 5,623 participants in a tournament, how many games would need to be played to determine the winner?”- Asked for a manager position at Amazon.com

“If you were shrunk to the size of a pencil and put in a blender, how would you get out?”- Asked for an analyst position at Goldman Sachs

“How many ridges [are there] around a quarter?”- Asked for a project analyst position at Deloitte

“Rate yourself on a scale of 1 to 10 how weird you are.”- Asked for an operations analyst position at Capital One

“If you could be any superhero, who would it be?”- Asked for a customer sales representative position at AT&T

“There are three boxes, one contains only apples, one contains only oranges, and one contains both apples and oranges. The boxes have been incorrectly labeled such that no label identifies the actual contents of the box it labels. Opening just one box, and without looking in the box, you take out one piece of fruit. By looking at the fruit, how can you immediately label all of the boxes correctly?”- Asked for a software QA engineer position at Apple

“How do you weigh an elephant without using a weigh machine?”- Asked for a software engineer position at IBM

“You have 8 pennies, 7 weigh the same, one weighs less. You also have a judge’s scale. Find the one that weighs less in less than 3 steps.”- Asked for a systems validation engineer position at Intel

“A train leaves San Antonio for [Houston] at 60 mph. Another train leaves [Houston] for San Antonio at 80 mph. [Houston] and San Antonio are 300 miles apart. If a bird leaves San Antonio at 100 mph, and turns around and flies back once it reaches the [Houston] train, and continues to fly between the two, how far will it have flown when they collide?”- Asked for a software engineer position at USAA

“Out of 25 horses, pick the fastest 3 horses. In each race, only 5 horses can run at the same time. What is the minimum number of races required?”- Asked for a software developer position at Bloomberg LP Financial