I've interviewed with Google a couple of times over the years and the interview questions are usually of the form "you have X data in such and such format, and we want to answer question Y as efficiently as possible." Then you have to puzzle out the algorithm, answer questions about its asymptotic complexity, and then whiteboard the code.

Sometimes the questions feel a little bit gimmicky in that they aren't really representative of what software developers spend most of their time doing. I understand that one guy at Google had to come up with a clever algorithm to figure out a snippet to use in the search results, but that can't be what the thousands of developers at Google are doing all day.

From the article

> "On the hiring side, we found that brainteasers are a complete waste of time"

That implies Google has some data to back it up, whether they themselves previously asked those types of questions, or they derived it from some other means. Either way, they aren't doing themselves any favors to dispel that urban legend. Most reading that will just assume they used to ask brainteasers, but no longer.

Yes, it's a rather strange objection to make... How could Google possibly use data on its employees to disprove that brainteasers work - if they weren't using brainteasers at some point?

I conducted hundreds of interviews at Google and never once asked (or saw someone else on my slate ask) a brainteaser such as these. Urban legend.

I think brainteasers were used in PM interviews fairly early on (I want to say 2004-2007, but I'm not sure on the exact dates). I've met people that were familiar with the brainteaser-type interview question, but such questions were banned before I started in 2009.

I think these are used more for PM interviews. I interviewed there once and was asked to design an evacuation plan for Manhattan (not San Francisco). I've also heard from employees there that such questions were preferred for PMs rather than engineers.