There’s a famous Google interview question that leaves even the smartest of candidates scratching their heads.
If you’ve ever seen The Internship with Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn, you might remember the scene where they're being interviewed for Google.
In the interview, they’re asked: "You're shrunken down to the size of a nickel and dropped into a blender, what do you do?"
They land the job, funnily enough, jumping from overly optimistic responses like waiting until the blades slow down and then using the momentum to jump out, or lying down and pretending it's an fan.
Advert
However, in reality, most people bomb this question.
With 3 million people applying to Google each year and an acceptance rate of just 0.2%, these brainteasers were designed to weed out the majority of candidates.
In fact, these scenarios are completely made up by the recruiters.
"We didn't get a list at that time of what questions to ask. We would share questions among each other," said Gayle McDowell, a former Google interviewer.
Other common interview questions included: How many golf clubs can fit in a 747? Or how much should you charge to wash all the windows in Seattle?
According to McDowell, the real goal was to see how people approached problem-solving, not whether they got the answer right.
"Sometimes there are people who make everything more complex than it needs to be, and that can be problematic," the interviewer added.
YouTuber Veritasium went down a rabbit hole, asking scientists and other experts how someone could actually escape the blender.
Some theories involved sticking to the glass like a gecko and climb up the glass side, or given the crazy strength-to-mass ratio, one could potentially jump out.
"'When I'm asked this questions, it's because they want to see if I can solve this problem,' that's actually not quite right," Gayle added.
Instead, the hiring team observes the candidate for five different things: addressing ambiguity, breaking down the problem, being creative, being smart, and communicating.
The brainteasers are a chance for candidates to see the world from a new perspective, igniting puzzle-solving and creative thinking in a similar way that scientists and mathematicians do.
That said, senior vice president of People Operations at Google, Laszlo Bock, deemed the brainteasers 'useless.'
He said: "On the hiring side, we found that brainteasers are a complete waste of time.[...] They don't predict anything," adding that "they're there to 'make the interviewer feel smart."
So don't worry if you couldn't figure it out - some questions aren't made for answers.