But... the kill command is the command to send arbitrary signals. It sends them all.
For question 5, you asked about an inode, and were told about an inumber, and got back an answer insisting that the inode was an index.
For question 6, maybe change "inode" to "information in the inode". The interviewee still has not figured out the distinction between an inode and an inumber.
For questions 7 and 8, apply the changes I suggested.
At what point do you decide that the interviewee is hopelessly arrogant and not worth your further time? And how do you get them off the phone gracefully?
Maybe around question 10, when they're quoting bits to show off and not saying the words that would actually let them communicate with other engineers like "SYN" and "ACK"?
No ill will is required on the interviewee's side, unless you consider refusing to waste time on bad candidates "ill will".
The conversation that I'd have to reconstruct has a very combative interviewee. Which would also fit said interviewee deciding to write up the article that I read. Which would mean that Google dodged a bullet.
I find it interesting to note that his site is down. There are a lot of possible causes, but it isn't good advertising for his webserver software.
For instance, perhaps the interviewer asked "What makes quicksort a good sorting method," instead of "What makes quicksort the best sorting method"—a very small difference in phrasing. In that case, the answer of "It's not always the best, or even suitable" is still technically true, but much more wrong. (And an answer like the one you started with, "Its average case is O(n log (n)), its worst case is O(n^2)," would have been enough to pass... but sitting on the phone and arguing about storage topology is itself a failure.)
As I mentioned in another comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12702130 , my (five-year-old, faulty) memory of Google's SRE phone interview is that they asked another question here with a very small but important phrasing difference: "What is the signal sent by the kill command" instead of "What is the kill signal". If you make that change, the interviewee's answer of "SIGKILL" becomes wrong, and the interviewer is right to insist on SIGTERM (which would otherwise make no sense). It is a quite literal game of telephone.
(Again, I can also imagine Google being totally wrong and the interviewer mangling the questions.)