I’ve never interviewed with Google and I never will, but I’ve had these sort of “technical” interviews before.

One I remember is that someone asked me it were possible to reach the internet on a Windows system without a default gateway set. I said, “Of course it is. You can have use a browser like Firefox that supports a proxy. Or you can use the system-level proxy. Or you can get creative with the routing table. There are other ways, too, that are more complex but would also work, but I’d have to look those up to be completely accurate.”

The interviewer said, “Wrong. You can’t reach the internet with no default gateway set. The traffic must pass through some sort of gateway. That is the default route.”

Of course, because I’m me I argued with the interviewer, finally telling him, “Give me 10 minutes and a Linux box. I’ll set up a squid proxy and then we’ll set no default gateway on the Windows box and with Firefox I can still reach the internet using its proxy capability.”

I didn’t get that job. Can’t imagine why. In my experience, you never get the job when your skills are beyond those of the person interviewing you.