Google has a similar interview process to other major tech companies.

Their questions are very smart and designed to test computer fundamentals, while giving the interviewer an easy time making a hire/no-hire decision.

The questions get progressively harder as the day progresses.

Starting with simple problems like, "You're trying to recover a machine, you're in single-user mode, /etc/passwd is corrupt, but none of your text editors are working on the boot image due to shared library issues. How would you rebuild /etc/passwd?"

They quickly progress to divide-and-conquer approaches for merge sorting data too large to fit in memory, and other standard coding puzzle questions.

How would you restore /etc/passwd on a machine with a corrupt root disk which is only barely functioning? You have a shell and most Unix shell commands, but no text editors.

How would you sort a file which is too large to fit in memory?