That's an idiotic interview question. I've experienced this at young companies where both the company and its engineers are too immature to understand basic etiquette in the industry. Btw I doubt Google would ask a stupid "gotcha" question like that. They tend to ask hard algorithmic questions.
FWIW I’ve had Google recruiters ask me stuff where they don’t understand the answer and the questions are things like “what is the protocol number for ICMP” and “what port does NTP use”. If one doesn’t work with these things very often, they’re very forgettable as they’re so easy to google and find the correct answer to in seconds, and therefore not worth memorizing. No idea if they’re still doing this, but it was like a crappy version of Hacker Jeopardy (#DFIU!). After about 6 months of back and forth with the recruiter and a few interviewers missing interviews, I just gave up and told them I was no longer interested.
I went through the swe generalist interview pipeline 3 times at Google, so that's about 15 interviews. All the questions have been standard , except this one dumb question, which was along the lines of "explain how multithreading works". I suppose he wanted me to follow up with some questions to narrow down the topic, but I was stressed out enough that I just started with the basics, like cores, processes, OS threads, and shared memory, trying to explain it in simple terms. He interrupted me about 5 minutes in and moved on.
Having interviewed people myself, I think that's an overly broad question to ask in an interview and if the candidate starts answering it as asked, then you're not going to get a lot of signal from it.
Otherwise I thought the problems asked weren't that difficult, one was even directly taken from Cracking the Coding Interview - if only I had read that chapter ahead of the interview...
Heh, what's this? You can't answer this question off the top of your head after I spent 2 hours purposefully researching obscure edge cases to craft it? I guess you're not a real engineer. Did you even pass the 101 courses? No, no, no... You're no fit for us here. You see, some of us have to actually work for a living. Try pulling yourself up by the bootstraps next time, kiddo!
Only in Amazon interviews I've had actual trivia questions, like having been asked questions that'd require you to know all POSIX signals by memory (that could be fair if you squint a bit) or, more absurdly, solve a problem tailored for a particular flag of the find utility (which I realized when I looked at the manual for the thing again), as any other solution was too complicated to be satisfactory.
