A man who applied for an engineering role at Google posted a list of the questions he was asked before getting rejected

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Pierre Guthrie

LinkedIn/Pierre Guthrie

Pierre Gauthier was rejected by Google.

Pierre Gauthier, a computer engineer who set up his own tech company 18 years ago, has published a blog post detailing all the questions Google asked him during an interview when he applied for a director of engineering role at the company.

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Writing on Gwan.com, the tech worker, explained that he recently had a phone interview with a Google recruiter for the role.

The call started off well but as the interview progressed, Guathier got an increasing amount of questions wrong.

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"As I qualified for the interview but failed to pass the test, this blog post lists the questions and the expected answers," wrote Gauthier in the blog post. "That might be handy if Google calls you one day."

Question five, the first question he gets wrong, was: "What is a Linux inode?"

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Gauthier replied "A unique file identifier for any given file system."

But the recruiter responded with: "Wrong, it's file metadata."

Not satisfied with Google's answer, Gauthier pushed back, saying: "The inode is an index uniquely identifying a file on a given filesystem, and you can lookup this index to fetch file attributes like size, time, owner and permissions; you can even add your own attributes on some file systems."

But the recruiter dismissed his comeback, saying: "Wrong, not 'attributes', it's 'metadata.'"

Gauthier went on to get the next five highly technical questions wrong and kill any chances he had of getting a job at Google. The questions look difficult, with plenty of technical terms that will be completely unfamiliar to anyone that hasn't studied computer science.

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At one point he even asked the recruiter: "What's the point of this test?"

In his blog post, Gauthier also provides his thoughts on each of the questions. Thoughts range from "typical computer science (1st year) lectures" to "how long is this crap going to last?"

At the end of his post, he jokes: "My score is four on ten, that's better than my best Google pagerank** ever!"

Read the full post here.

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