I interviewed for Google once – at their invitation, I wasn’t looking for a job, and made that clear at the outset. I breezed through the preliminary questions done online and was invited to Sydney (since I have an Australian passport, this was the easiest option for them).

Great, free trip to Oz.

All the interviewers took roughly the same tack: a question with a simple, obvious answer, then a complication that required good analysis to scale up.

One interviewer asked a question where the answer was “hash table”. I gave a textbook answer and elaborated on variants, depending on the nature of the problem.

Feedback on the interview: everyone was impressed except the hash table dude, who claimed my textbook explanation was “weird”. I still to this day can’t understand how (a) Google could hire someone who didn’t understand hash tables and (b) used them as the final filter on a candidate who aced everything else.

Luckily I wasn’t that keen to work for them…