27 Jobs with Unbelievably Tough Interview Questions

Some of those questions are perfectly reasonable for the roles. Some are just annoying. It's the gotcha questions that I really can't stand.

> 14. "How do you reverse a text string on the Unix command line?"

Meh... ruby -e "puts 'yourString'.reverse"

Am I missing something?

9 possibilities (0-9 excluding 6) for each of the last 4 digits and 6 (0-5) for the first one.

6 * 9^4 = 39366

The probability is 100/39366 = 0.0025%

Edit: More perls; "What is the angle at 3:15?" humm 0?

And nowadays we have google for some added prosthetic knowledge. It's becoming increasingly important to grasp concepts well enough to ask the right questions, but knowing simple unrelated facts by heart becomes irrelevant. At most you have to remember that there was something to remember so you can look it up.

edit: can a native speaker guide me on where to set commas correctly :) ?

That's easy. 2 x 20c and 4 x 2c.

Nobody said the coins had to be American and still in circulation.

Any answers ???

Ofcourse the answer baffled me

I was asked a similar question, but in a quite different context. I was on jury duty in the Los Angeles area in July, 1987. Our panel was sent to a courtroom that needed a jury for some drug charge. The procedure was that 14 from the panel would sit in the jury box (12 jurors plus 2 alternates), where we'd be questioned by the judge and lawyers, and if any of us were rejected for that jury, someone else from the panel would take their place and be question. Repeat until there are 12 acceptable jurors.

One of the questions the defense attorney asked us was if we could have dinner that night with anyone in the world, living or past, who would we choose? I was in the fifth seat in the front row, so had some time to think before he got to me. The answers ahead of me were the candidate's deceased mother, Richard Feynman, Pope John Paul II [1], and I forget the other.

Then he asked me.

I said "Adolph Hitler".

A lot of the panel that was not in the box (maybe 30 people) had been kind of nodding off, as this was boring, and the courtroom was hot (it was the middle of summer, and the courtroom was not air conditioned). My answer woke them all up.

The attorney asked why and I explained that Hitler did terrible things to other people, and was clearly insane. That makes him at least interesting, but not unique. What sets Hitler apart, and makes him a good candidate for dinner, is that he somehow got a lot of apparently sane, rational, educated, well-off people to willingly help him commit his atrocities. He must have had tremendous charisma or something in order to get those results, and so a dinner with him should be very interesting.

The prosecutor also asked us a far out question. She asked us what we would say if aliens (the space kind, not the human from another country kind...) contacted us and said they had been monitoring our news and were confused about the "drug problem", and asked us to explain it.

I told her that I would tell them that we have arbitrarily classified some drugs as illegal and some as legal, without much regard to the actual harm of each, and so we have some drugs legal (alcohol, tobacco...yes, I know these might not scientifically be drugs, but for purposes of drug law policy they are effectively drugs), and some illegal (marijuana, LSD, cocaine, heroin, for instance), even though some of the latter group (such as marijuana) do the same or less harm than some in the former group. Then on top of that we don't admit that this is arbitrary and irrational, and so our schools, police, and government lie to kids telling them that drugs like marijuana are as bad as heroin. Of course, the kids end up trying marijuana, find out that they were lied to, and then do not trust the advice they've received on other drugs, and so likely end up trying drugs that really ARE bad. And then we waste a lot of money trying to enforce these stupid laws on things like marijuana when we could be putting that money and time toward real problems. She tried to defend the drug laws and policy, and we argued for a bit before she moved on.

So...basically...I told the prosecutor that this case was stupid and irrational, and she is working for a system that purposefully lies and makes the problems worse. Oh, and I had long hair and a beard and was wearing a tie-dye shirt that made me look like a hippy who had just come from a Grateful Dead concert and was probably on drugs right now.

I was pretty sure at this point that I was not going to make it onto that jury. The only question was whether it would be the defense or the prosecution that used one of their three peremptory challenges to kick me off.

I was guessing it would be the prosecutor, because I had basically told her I considered this whole thing stupid and harmful. On the other hand, I did say when asked that I would vote according to what the law says, regardless of how stupid I thought that law or its application was, and they knew I was a software engineer with a math degree from Caltech and so might have felt that this made it believable that I would be able to let logic rule instead of emotion.

It was actually the defense that did it. The prosecutor used all 3 of hers on other people, and the defense used his first 2 on others, then took me out with his final one. I think they were both holding off because they each thought the other might take me out.

[1] This was in July, 1987, so John Paul II was the current Pope, and Feynman was still alive.

Well, I have no idea whatsoever how to approach that...but I would not be applying to be a test engineer at a rocket company. This sounds like something that an actual rocket engineer should know, and I would guess that it is even something that would be easy for such an engineer.

> “What is the first thing you’d print with a 3D printer if you had one?”—Linux Systems Administrator I, Rackspace

I'd print whatever test object the printer's instructions say to print to verify that I have set the printer up correctly and that it is working.

> “Please describe an instance where you had to make a decision without all of the necessary information.”—Analytics, athenahealth

The obvious answer is "this interview".

> 27. “How would you find the square root of 1.2?” —Hardware Engineer, Jump Trading

I would guess that some context is missing here. I don't think it means that if you needed the square root of 1.2 for something you were doing, how would you obtain it. I expect it is asking how you would do it in hardware, or in firmware. It's then time to talk about what computational ability the hardware has. For example, if it is going to be firmware, is there a divide instruction on the processor? Do we have floating point or are we using fixed point? How accurate does it need to be? Yadda yadda.

If it is asking how you would obtain it for yourself, then the correct answer is use a calculator, unless you just need a quick approximation, in which case it is to note that 11^2 = 121, so 1.1^2 = 1.21, and so 1.1 is a pretty good approximation to sqrt(1.2). If you need slightly better, but still cannot use a calculator, note that 1.1 is slightly high, and assume the right answer is 1.1-x. That gives (1.1-x)^2 = 1.2, which can be rewritten as x = 0.01/(2.2-x). If x is small, we can neglect it in 2.2-x, suggesting we look at x = 0.01/2.2. Let's approximate 2.2 with 2 to make the mental math easier, giving us x = 0.005. That gives us a new approximation for sqrt(1.2) of 1.1 - 0.005 = 1.095. That is quite close. It's square is 1.199025.

If you want an answer that works well under both the "it's for firmware" interpretation and the "it's for me and I don't have a calculator" interpretation is to use the binomial theorem. For square roots, that says sqrt(1+x) = 1 + x/2 - x^2/8 + x^3/16 - 5x^4/128 + ...

With x = 0.2, that's 1 + 0.1 - 0.005 + 0.0005 - ... Note that if you stop at 3 terms you get the same approximation I got earlier, 1.095. Four terms gives 1.0955. That's a good place to stop because 5 terms gets harder to do mentally because of that stupid 5/128.