There must be thousands of people on HN who interviewed at Google over the years. Did anyone ever get a question like this?
Sometimes the questions feel a little bit gimmicky in that they aren't really representative of what software developers spend most of their time doing. I understand that one guy at Google had to come up with a clever algorithm to figure out a snippet to use in the search results, but that can't be what the thousands of developers at Google are doing all day.
> "On the hiring side, we found that brainteasers are a complete waste of time"
That implies Google has some data to back it up, whether they themselves previously asked those types of questions, or they derived it from some other means. Either way, they aren't doing themselves any favors to dispel that urban legend. Most reading that will just assume they used to ask brainteasers, but no longer.