One thing to note is at the time they asked to keep the process confidential which I have done to this day. The other thing was based on the interview I was left with the opinion that I would have zero chance to impact anything there. The creativeness that I thrive on would be lost in a sea of noise.

I was contacted again recently and just declined immediately.

Eventually, one of my old friends was hired to be one of their top engineering vice president. After that, the door was wide open. I still had to do the 2 day interview process, but it was with the very top Google engineers and what I would describe as softball questions.

Back in 2006, I created one of their most significant new technologies but also left the company, largely because there was essentially no management structure and no promise of career growth. What is the point of working at a company if you are reporting to a new grad and your manager never shows up to meetings?

My sentiment was shared much more widely than is known outside the company.

For the odds of one or more of 8 people sharing the same birthday as you, just calculate the odds that none of them share your birthday, and then subtract it from one. That means each person can have a birthday on 364 out of 365 days. So the equation looks like this:

1 – (364^8/365^8) = 2.17%

i.e. very unlikely, you should not take the wager. Even if the friend is used, the odds only become about 2.44%. Since you pay $1 when you lose, and receive $2 when you win, you want the odds to be greater than 33.33% in your favor. That will not happen until there are 148 other people at the party. But since people cannot be split into fractions, you’ll really need about 150 people before you are likely to break even. The question may have been phrased this way as a trick, to see if the interviewee recognized the difference from the traditional birthday problem.

For the traditional birthday problem, the odds of 2 or more people having the same birthday in a group of 10, again it is easier to calculate the inverse and then subtract from one. So to calculate the odds that no two people in the group share the same birthday, the first person can have a birthday on one of 365 days, and each successive person can choose from one less day than the previous, so that they all have a birthday on a different day. Like this:

(365 * 364 * 363 * 362 * … 356) / 365^10 = 88.3%

Then subtract from 100% to find the odds that two or more people of a group of 10 _do_ share the same birthday:

100% – 88.3% = 11.69%

Again, not very likely.

Recently I attended an interview in Motorola on rolls of Kelly Services for Solaris System Support¦.In the interview panel 2 Hr people are there and they started the discuss with a sentence Ok Lets have a friendly chat with you and ask me several questions and the interview was around 1 hour¦

1) What are you expecting from Motorola?
2) What are your roles & responsibilities?
3) How u backup & restore?
4) What is the Model No. of your backup machine? Is the Machine is connected to the servers?
5) Explain about Backup types?
6) What is a Switch?
7) Can you write the command to disable/enable telnet service?
8) How to see the telnet service status?
9) How to see the detail description of any service (eg:snmp,telnet etc)?
10) What is this ifconfig?
11) What is NIC?
12) What is this sfe0, le0, hme0, pcn0? Why the NIC cards have different naming convenstions?
13) You have mention in the resume @ roles & responibilities that Partitioned the disks, created new file systems, mounted them and changed the /etc/vfstab entries.(Where and When u use this)?
14) What is df k and df h? What is k, h refers?
15) What description will it give when u type #ifconfig command?
16) When did u complete your Sun Certification exam?
17) When is Ur graduate passout?
18) You are working at Gcentric Technologies right? Where it is located.
19) What project they handle and can u explain where they use Solaris in there project?
20) Explain about /etc/syslog.conf. What is the use of it? Can u write the configuration of this file?
21) How You Schedule the events? Write it on the paper?
22) Questions on Process Management?
23) How to format any type of file system?
24) Where will u check to solve any hardware problem or etc?
25) What is SVM?
26) Can u explain the RAID Concept? Use the White Board and explain?
27) Can mirroring is possible with 2 disks?
28) How to check the status of Meta devices?
29) Although u have SVM, then Wat is the need of VERITAS Volume Manager?
30) VxVm comes with Solaris isn’t?
31) What are the daily activities you do in your company on Solaris machines?
32) What is flash archive? What is the purpose of that?
33) You have 1+ year’s exp on Solaris? With in 1 year of Experience what are the problems you faced? Can u list all the problems? (The interviewer noting all the problems what I told)?
34) What is nfs? Explain the configuration of nfs?
35) Do you install packages in Solaris? If so how many times u installed the package?
36) How to mount CD/ROM or any external hard drives?
37) What are zones?
38) Do u installed VERITAS s/w at any time? Is your company using VERITAS?
39) Did you open the sparc PC’s and saw any time? Like assembling & dissembling of Sparc PC’s?
40) What is ISCSI?
41) How to see what type of SCSI devices/controllers we have?
42) What is SMF?
43) Suppose if you got any problem in PCs? How will you handle it?
44) How many servers are there in your company? What is the model and type of server it is?
45) Did u any time opened the Sun Servers and see how many hardisk are there/how many processers etc.Did you check any time?
46) What workstations you people use in your company?
47) How many web developers are there in your company?
48) What is the size of Ur team?
49) Where the .conf files resides?
50) Do you got any hardware problems/errors at any time?
51) What is crashdumps? What is the location of crashdumps file?
52) You got a problem in your sparc system. Where will search for the information?
53) Do you heared about solve.com website?
54) Do you heared about OMC?

And then he explain the roles and responsibilities of the job position?

and here the interview was ended?

After 2 days I got a call that I was selected for Motorola¦

All the Best see you soon @ Motorola¦

What if it asks for exactly only 2 people who has the same birthday?

Here is my calculation:

Conbination_X_2 * 1/365 = (X!/((X-2)!*2!)) * 1/365 > 0.5
where X = 20

Surpisingly, nobody ever asked for the chance of exactly only 2 people who have the same birthday among a group of people.

Please comment on my answer = 20 people, i.e., among 20 people, only 2 people sharing the same birthday has a better-than-even chance. Here, I did not use “at least”.

Thanks!

Noboday asked if the problem is asking the probability of only 2 people who have the same birthday. To get a 50-50 chance, how many people should be there for only two people who have the same birthday?

My calulation is this: Combine_x_2 * (1/365), where x = 20. So, it is not 23 if it asks only 2 people sharing birthday.

Is there any comment on the anwser (20)?

Thanks!

If I we’re asked that same question I would absolutely take the “wager” as long it was exactly as you worded it. If true, then despite the fact that your friend has a much higher earning potential than you – you’re still giving up the chance at an opportunity by declining.

As phrased, the wager does not result in one person having to pay the other for each person they ask – instead, each friend simply “gets” money from somewhere for each birthday.

I’m not sure if this is how it was meant to be understood but I can see how it might be reflective of opportunistic thinking.

Thanks for the great post!

Cheers,
Kris S.

By the way, I’ve put together 140 Google interview questions. Your readers might find it helpful.

Check it out: []

– Seattle Interview Coach