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8 interview questions engineers struggle to answer

Asked to: Systems engineer at Google Q: How many trailing zeros are in the number 5! (5 factorial)? Suggested answers: Option 1: 5 ! =120. So there is 1 trailing zero. Option 2: This sounds like one geared not so much towards getting the right answer, but getting to it the right way. If you think a bit and say 'one', the interviewer will know you did it the brute-force way, doing the math. You'd get at the answer faster, and probably impress them more, if you think instead how many times a ten will be produced in doing that math, rather than what the actual result of the math will be. Asked to: Software engineer at Facebook Q: You have two light bulbs at a 100-story building. You want to find the floor at which the bulbs will break when dropped. Find the floor using the least number of drops. Suggested answers: Option 1: Start moving up in increments of 10 floors and dropping the bulb until it breaks ( ie : drop from floor 10, if it doesn't break, d