> I had a friend interview with Google to work in their uptime group or something like that. He had to solve some brainteaser about generating an in-order list of numbers that meet a certain criteria in O(n) time and constant space. I get that someone somewhere thought it was a good idea. But if you're tasked with keeping failures from happening being able to solve that brainteaser doesn't say anything about your suitability for the job. Being able to imagine disaster scenarios and how they'll play out seems a lot more important to me.

I think Google's approach to hiring has generally been "let's hire really smart and overqualified people and then they'll be suitable for any job".