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.
