10 questions you'll have to answer if you want to be a big-shot engineer at Google

Working for Google may sound fun, but the interview process sure doesn't.

After applying for a director of engineering role at the company, Pierre Gauthier -- a computer engineer who started his own tech company 18 years ago -- was asked some pretty intimidating questions in a phone interview.

After failing to give the Google recruiter the "right answers," he decided to create a Gwan.com blog post to share the challenging questions, his responses and candid thoughts with the public.

Though Gauthier managed to answer the first four questions correctly, it was all downhill from there. Gauthier soon found himself arguing his answers with the recruiter, and by the ninth question, he frustratedly asked, "What's the point of this test?"

Basically, if Google ever calls you for an interview, here are ten questions you'll want to know the answers to:

1. What is the opposite function of malloc() in C?

2. What Unix function lets a socket receive connections?

3. How many bytes are necessary to store a MAC address?

4. Sort the time taken by: CPU register read, disk seek, context switch, system memory read.

5. What is a Linux inode?

6. What Linux function takes a path and returns an inode?

7. What is the name of the KILL signal?

8. Why Quicksort is the best sorting method?

9. There's an array of 10,000 16-bit values, how do you count the bits most efficiently?

10. What is the type of the packets exchanged to establish a TCP connection?

Those sound like a joy, right?

And just in case you didn't think Gauthier was properly qualified for the position, he began his blog post by summarizing his many years of experience:

For the sake of the discussion, I started coding 37 years ago (I was 11 years old) and never stopped since then. Beyond having been appointed as R&D Director 24 years ago (I was 24 years old), among (many) other works, I have since then designed and implemented the most demanding parts of TWD's R&D projects...

Following his less-than-satisfying interview experience Gauthier posed the question, "Is Google raising the bar too high or is their recruiting staff seriously lacking the skills they are supposed to rate?"