Google’s Bizarre Interview Question That Most People Answer Wrong

Different companies use different interview techniques, and some can ask tricky questions like Google, which does everything to find the right employee. Its unique method aims to test how applicants can react to unexpected questions and what kind of solutions they can come up with.

An unexpected question

If you're one of the thousands of people who would like to work for Google, you have to prepare yourself to face very unusual questions during the job interview.

One of them has been this one: "Imagine you have been shrunk down to the size of a coin and dropped into a tall blender. What should you do to escape before the blender turns on in 60 seconds time?"

Common answer and its background

After some moments of shock, most applicants would say the simplest answer to this question, aka they would just simply jump out.

The reasoning behind this answer traces back to an observation first made by Alfonso Borelli, often called the father of biomechanics, in the 17th century. Borelli noticed that animals of all different sizes seemed to be able to jump around the same height. Despite being vastly different in mass and height, dogs, cats, horses, and squirrels can all jump about 1.2 meters into the air. This is because the energy our muscles produce scales according to our mass.

Professor Gregory Sutton, an expert on insect motion from the University of Lincoln, told MailOnline, "If you just imagine muscle as something that produces energy, the muscle produces mechanical energy that can accelerate the animal up to a certain height. If that animal is half the size, it has half the energy, but it also has half the mass so it actually jumps to the same height."

According to the theory, if you were being shrunk down, the area of your muscles would decrease at a slower rate than your mass, so, your strength-to-weight ratio would increase, and you should simply be able to leap out of the blender.

It isn't the right answer.

Even though the jumping solution sounds right, it isn't. The reason is that to jump high, you need to transfer as much energy as possible from your legs into the ground, but this gets harder to do as you get smaller.

If you were shrunk down to the size of a penny, you'd only have a fraction of a second between starting the jump and your feet leaving the floor, so your muscles would need to contract really fast to transfer that energy. The problem is that the faster your muscles contract, the less force they are able to produce, an effect called the force-velocity relationship.

So you might need to look for a better answer to this question, which isn't that complicated either.

This might be the correct answer.

Professor Sutton believes that using a catapult system to get out would be the right answer to this tricky question, "If I were shrunk down and put in a blender, I'd use a small rubber band to fling myself out. The catapult system would work great at that size because your strength-to-mass ratio is very beneficial even if your jumping mechanisms don't work so well."

Professor Jim Usherwood, an expert on the mechanics of motion from the Royal Veterinary College, mentioned another solution, "If you want to make something go fast, you need to give it a lot of energy. If you have really short arms, it has left your hand before you have time to give it that energy, as muscle power is limited - unless you can wind up a spring."

"When you're shooting a bow, you don't need to move your body fast in order to accelerate the arrow to a great speed. Instead, you can move slowly and use your strength to store a massive amount of energy in a spring and release it very quickly."

So here it is: if you could wind up a spring over a suitable time - about 0.1 seconds - and then release it, you could ping yourself out of the blender.

A really tricky test

Well, that is truly a brain-teaser that not everyone will figure out, but don't worry if you didn't get the right answer. Gayle Laakmann McDowell, a former Google software engineer and author of The Google Resume, says the company has finally "banned" most of these awful hiring practices.

Of the brain-teasers, she says, "If an interviewer were to ask a candidate a brain-teaser, despite the policy, the hiring committee would likely disregard this interviewer’s feedback and send a note back telling the interviewer not to ask such silly questions."

If you'd like to get to know another interesting technique, that you can come across on an interview, read our next article, The "Chair" Method Job Interviewers Use to Test You.