In an excerpt from his new book, William Poundstone believes that logic puzzles, riddles and trick questions during interviews surprising that Google is notoriously difficult. Do they do through the next round?

live in a time of despair. Never in the life of the memory competition for employment has been more intense. It has never been harder job interviews.

For some job seekers, Google is the shining city on the hill. This is where the smartest people make things more interesting. In the U.S., Google consistently ranks at or near the top of the list of Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work For. But companies are also unsexy with several qualified candidates for each position. That's great for companies that are capable of contracting. Like Google, just to skim the best talents in their fields. Not very good for the plaintiffs. They face a hard, rough, more invasive testing.

This is most evident in the interviews. There are, of course, many traditional types of questions asked during job interviews. These include the "behavior" issues that have become almost clichés: "What is your greatest failure in life?" Questions about the company: "How would you describe Holland & Barrett to a person who came from another country?" And finally, there are open challenges such as mental how they weigh an elephant without using a ladder, something that Google is known primarily an attempt to measure mental flexibility and potential, even business. The answer? Push the beast with a barge. The weight of the barge will be elephant to sink several inches into the water. Draw a line on the hull of the barge to mark the water level. Then direct the elephant in the ground. Loading of the barge of 100 pounds of sand bags (or anything useful) up 'that it runs at the line marked on the hull. The elephant weighs as much as sand.

The Google interview style is indebted to an older tradition of using logic puzzles to test applicants for technology companies. Consider this: The interviewer writes six numbers in the boardroom - 10, 9, 60, 90, 70, 66. The question is, what number comes next in the series?

most of the time the job seeker must face, bravely trying to make sense of a series that provides all information to be totally meaningless. Most of the candidates to give. Some are lucky a flash of intuition.

Forget the math. Specify the numbers in plain language, which gives the following: 1009 90 66 sixty sixty. The numbers are in order of number of cards that are in their names. Ten is not the only number that can be written with three letters. Years ago one, two and six. Nine is not the only four-letter, a nonzero digit, four and five. This is a list of the largest numbers that can be written in a number of letters.

Now, for the payment, what number comes next? Whatever the number is 66 must have nine letters in it (not counting a possible scenario) and must be the oldest of nine card number. Play with him and is likely to reach 96. Does not look like you can get something over 100, because it begins "a hundred" that requires 10 points or more. You might wonder why the list is 100 (one hundred) instead of 70 (sixty). "Millions" and "billion" have seven letters, too. A reasonable estimate is that they are using cardinal numbers written in proper English style manual. How to write the number 100 is "one hundred".

In many of these companies, the only correct answer is 96. At Google, 96 is considered an acceptable response. A better answer is 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000. Aka "a googol".

This is not the best answer, though. The preferred answer is 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000.000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. Ten googol.

puzzles like this can have drawbacks as interview questions. The answer here is a simple matter of perspective: you either get it or not. There is a process of deduction that are linked, and therefore no way to tell someone to solve the problem of someone who already knew the answer. Google, of all places, persons applying for a job knows how to use a search engine. Candidates are expected Google to get Google interview advice, including questions. Accordingly, Google encourages its investigators to use a different type of question, more open, with no definitive "right answer".

You and your neighbor has the next car boot sale the same day in one place. Both will sell the same item. You will put your item on sale for £ 100. The neighbor will be selling in less than 40 pounds. The articles are in the same position. What do you do, assuming you are not in a position of special friendship with the neighbor?

not to be on good terms, especially if you say that a strategic response is expected. As if the fact that this question is asked frequently in the Wall Street houses the most aggressive. The solution is to get the friendly neighbor to the side and say, "You lose money, provided for 40 pounds." But this plan is not considered a particularly good response. Suppose that the general spender are two identical items are on sale for £ 100. It is equally likely to choose either to be sold.

market. You can offer to pay the neighbor not to market your product. A better answer is simple: purchase the item from a neighbor. He will be happy to sell your product immediately. It is not likely to be offended or increase the price. You can haggle, like any other buyer, and you can get for under £ 40. Why would you want your subject? When you put something on sale for ? 100, you expect to get a decent profit to compensate for the time you invested in your sales and factoring in the possibility that it will sell. Anything that reduces the possibility of selling their product in fact it costs a significant fraction of which £ 100.

The numbers in this puzzle were chosen so that the price of the neighbor is comparable with the economic damage is done to you. To purchase the item, you get the right to keep the weight on the market when it suits their purposes, over the right to sell at whatever price the market will bear. All you get by selling the second point is pure profit. The best plan is to hide an item until the first sale. Then place the second point of sale at a reduced price, according to the latest time of day it is.

As the labor market collapsed in 2008, employers took his career, or just telephone interviews where the interviewer asks questions called a filter or evidence of fire. These are simple questions or criteria that (supposedly) eliminate the "bad" people. Many companies trivia about the company. Morgan Stanley asked respondents to name a recent history they have read in the Financial Times - apparently, many can not -. O to give the square root of 0.01 (which is 0.1)

Bloomberg LP is great for proofreading. Some candidates are tested that must count the number of occurrences of a certain letter, upper or lower case, in a paragraph. It is much harder than it looks. (Do not you think? Counting the hours in this paragraph. Some 15 years ago, and almost nobody gets them all.)

"If you were a cartoon character, what would you be and why?" This is a question that Bank of America has asked candidates to personal bankers. "I told Yogi Bear," recalled one of the applicants. "I do not remember why I said it, but hiring managers applaud everything." He gave the position immediately. Such questions sometimes downright stupid, became more frequent. How to be a math whiz or technology is not relevant to the performance of most companies, large companies have increased their efforts to find the perfect combination of candidates and legal personality. An online retailer has asked, "On a scale of one to 10, chances are you? "The preferred answer is somewhere in between, CEO Tony Hsieh said. One is" probably a little too puritanical for us "and 10" may be too psychotic " .

"It's a ridiculous question," said Feynman. "On the one hand, all covers are round. Some are square! "