Top 25 Oddball Interview Questions Of 2010 | Hacker News Reader

Top 25 Oddball Interview Questions Of 2010

glassdoor.com

14 pointspierrefar12 comments

These are all pretty great, but I admit I'd likely blank on most of them. One of my favorite questions to ask when I interview people is "what would you do with $10 million cash right now?" It's a question that exposes a few key things about the person's set of values. There is no right answer but if the candidate starts off by telling me what clothes or car they would buy, they are the wrong person. I want someone who would start something in the same field they are interviewing for and a series of follow up "why" questions usually puts us on an interesting path.

Seems like there are two distinct type of questions in the list.

The first are math-based and seem to have real value, like this one from amazon: "If you had 5,623 participants in a tournament, how many games would need to be played to determine the winner?"

The rest (in significant portions) fall in the more philosophical "how would you move mount fuji". I've never been asked this type of question, I hope I never am. I don't plan on wasting time trying to answer...just give a "no clue" and move on. I find these question to be total BS and super arrogant. Supposed to see how you approach problem solving...seriously the best way to do that is to provide a stupid problem? I honestly think it made sense to ask this when you were the only one...made you look cool. Now it makes you look like a "me-too".

Does anyone know of any real value with this 2nd type of question which couldn't be served by something more straightforward (which isn't to say easier)?

Those questions can show you if someone is willing to call out an interviewer for asking a stupid question. I doubt the people asking these kinds of questions are looking for that sort of answer however.

26. How many times would you click "View Answers" before you say, "Fuck this" and close your browser?

Yeah the page is clearly built for SEO purposes and the links out are designed for padding the page view numbers.

And to top it off, a link bait title "Top %d %s of 2010".

http://www.google.com/search?q=headlines+linkbait

Which are, not surprisingly, some of the headline structures that pulled the best in old direct response copywriting ads.

The majority of the questions that I looked at where applications of binary search.

I think I know why so many of these are simple binary search questions. If you actually read the full interview descriptions that most of these come from, you'll see that the vast majority of them were rejected. As an interviewer, the very first question I ask is "what is a binary search and what is its big-O run time?" Assuming the candidate has a CS background, this is meant to take up about 15 seconds of the interview and allow us to get to the real questions. I suspect many other interviewers do something similar. Most of these posters likely struggled with it and didn't get to the real questions, so that's all they could share.

Unsurprisingly some of these are just Fermi questions. Many others are just designed to see if you can actually analyse and talk.

I don't know what comes over people when they are faced with the prospect of interviewing someone. For every interviewer it seems there's a unique crackpot theory on how to hire people. And, to be honest, I myself have given some dreadful interviews to candidates in the past based on whatever happened to be my current favorite theory of how to weed out the good from the bad.

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