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Comment by squeaky-clean | Hacker News Reader

I interviewed at Burger King in college, the manager told me I was the only applicant in their system to get above 80% on the personality test. It was incredibly easy things like, "How many minutes are acceptable to show up late for your shift? 5 minutes, 15 minutes, 30 minutes, being late is unacceptable". Or "If you knew there were no cameras able to see you, and no other employees around, how much money is okay to take from the register? $1, $5, $20, any amount is unacceptable"

He said something along the lines of "I know some employees are going to try to steal from the register, but why would they admit that in an interview?

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I took one once (at iZod, I think), which included some tripwire questions. The manager said afterwards that e.g. if you saw "a customer left $0.02 in change on the counter when they left the store, what do you do?" and you picked "I chase them down the block to give it back", that's a sign that you're bullshitting the questions too hard.

Or, someone might also have a sense of karmic justice, whereby $0.02 is the same as $200 in the ethical context of returning a lost object to its owner.

The manager sounds like they'd be happy to steal your wages, as long as it was "only a small amount". You dodged a bullet there.

I mean, from the perspective of the manager, you really don't want an employee who's going to run out of the store to return an amount of money that won't matter to the customer. One can understand a peculiar value system, and also think that the conclusions it reaches are bad for your situation. (See also: "it's okay to take money from the cash register if I need it".)

I also think that going from that question to them stealing your wages can only be fairly analogized if it's a similarly insignificant amount. Is it wage theft if they underpay me by $0.02? Yes. Does it really matter? Not to me.

I suppose it depends if you believe in principle over pragmatism.

Personally, for me the amount is irrelevant; action and intent is what matters, so in some contexts $0.02 would absolutely matter to me.

If getting on with your job when a customer has left $0.02 on the counter would be such a severe violation of your principles, you're likely unsuitable for jobs.

The question is hypothetical rather than practical, and in many roles (civil service, accountancy, law) demonstrated principles are a fundamental requirement.

The premise of the manager's hypothetical question was to determine whether someone is dishonest, which is flawed.

As someone who has hired 100+ people over the years, I’m choosing the principled person over the unprincipled one every single time

I hire people with reasonable principles. Understanding transaction costs and personal responsibility is a principle.

Rigid, extreme fundamentalists with over-simplified principles are not good employees.

I'm guessing the only choices were "run after them" and "steal it"

It's been quite a long time (like, 20 years), but I think the choices were something like "take it for yourself", "put it in the register", "leave it on the counter", and "chase the customer down".

I mean, that's why the tests are BS. The real answer for 2 cents is maybe a quick "sir your change" but otherwise nothing. But some HR filters expect you to brown nose and act like you'll move heaven and earth to give maximum QoL to a McDonandls customer taking To-Go.

>Is it wage theft if they underpay me by $0.02? Yes. Does it really matter? Not to me.

well: being pedantic, 2 cents an hour done constantly adds up to $40 a year. If we're talking minimum wage, every dollar counts.

That's part of the issue, a lot of wage theft happens to those who need it the most. But they also tend to be the most exploitable.

If that's your take you are not smart enough for the job. The workplace dodged a bullet.

No one cares about a persons 'sense of karmic justice' or things people make up in their heads to be clever, they are answering questions on a test.

If their IQ can't adapt to a simple question, how could they flip a burger? Their 'sense of karmic justice' or being clever might get in the way, and since they have no idea of reality they won't know what the job requires.

The pride people take in getting IQ tests wrong is quite perplexing.

Off Topic since answering basic questions is too hard for HN, but the "tripwire questions" are also/only? to open the employee to the idea of taking money, the next question might be taking $1 from the till.

Have you "thought about suicide" is to desensitize you to the real questions. If you think it's a dumb question then they have fooled you.

The manager was using the question in an attempt to determine whether someone was a liar, not a quiz on workplace protocol.

A well-developed code of personal ethics might not matter in the context of burger-flipping, but jobs requiring a high IQ usually also require someone to have principles.

“Is dishonesty OK if it financially benefits the company?”

How would a high IQ candidate answer this question?

You’re in a desert walking along in the sand when all of the sudden you look down, and you see a tortoise, it’s crawling toward you. You reach down, you flip the tortoise over on its back. The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over, but it can’t, not without your help. But you’re not helping. Why is that?

What do you mean I'm not helping?!

"I mean you're not helping. Why is that, Leon?"

Such a great movie.

Except some people would literally do that. Probably the ones where $.02 is noticeable amounts of money.

The question presupposed it was unnoticeable.

But…that’s the right answer

In college I worked at Circuit City selling computers. Lots of similar questions. "Is it okay to take display merchandise if others are doing it?" type stuff. Definitely weeds out some people I guess.

Seems like it'd weed out people who are caught easily..

Same here. I worked at Circuit City during college, and had a similar interview, although it was more like an interrogation. I was asked the same question multiple times: "Is it okay to take stuff home from work, even something simple like a pen?" The interviewer kept leaning into me, like a detective questioning a murder suspect, trying to break me. It was bizarre.

Maybe that was a while ago, because almost all of the personality tests that I've had to take are, question: "I enjoy the challenge of collaborating with my coworkers" answer: strongly agree, slightly agree, neither agree nor disagree, slightly disagree, strongly agree

With the questions all being like that with different wording, "I find myself getting frustrated in high stress situations.", "I enjoy high stress situations because they are exciting.", "Being around a lot of people all the time can be annoying", etc.

Over and over and over again for about fifteen minutes.

Well, I guess one way of looking at it is would you rather have the guy who truthfully told you that it was okay to steal $1 from the register, or the guy who lied about saying any amount was unacceptable?

I applied for a software development job at a regional bank and had to take a similar test. Questions along the lines of "When is it appropriate to sell drugs to your coworkers?" I get the feeling it was intended more for tellers and other low level employees given the nature of a lot of the questions, but it had one or two ambiguous questions that tripped me up because neither extreme of the multiple choice options seemed moral.

They never asked me to interview and I wonder if my "wrong" answers to the ambiguous questions disqualified me.

> why would they admit that in an interview?

To demonstrate their honesty. ;)

> "I know some employees are going to try to steal from the register, but why would they admit that in an interview?“

A lot of the time, it’s an unfamiliarity with “test taking as being a test of determining theory of mind of the test-giver”.

Rather than answering however they think the test-giver would want the answers to look like, they approach the test with alternative less useful approaches, ones like “holistic reframed hypotheticals” where they’re thinking of the situation in a modified hypothetical with a real world context introduced and with information that might dramatically change one’s answer, such as

“assume you’ve learned a coworker has taken some money out of the cash-drawer, how much money would be your threshold to snitch on them to management versus E.G. just asking them to put the money back?”, for which many people’s answer will not be “even one dollar”.

It is a trained skill to know this is a flawed approach and that broadly, “most tests don’t want you to make outside assumptions or reframe situations, and you should default to using strict and as-literal-as-possible interpretations of questions”.

Except you also have to account for the low IQ test writer being unable to write what they intended to ask.

Did you ask to see which questions you supposedly got wrong?

"How much sawdust is legally acceptable to put in the chicken tenders breading? 10%, 25%, 50%, sawdust in the chicken tenders breading is unacceptable".

OP put unacceptable but the answer was 25%

He refused to tell me, but I'm betting it was one about getting called in to work on a day off because someone else called out with no notice.

"How many questions is it acceptable to lie on when taking a personality test? 10 lies, 5 lies, 2 lies, lying on a personality test is unacceptable."

Reminds me of the narcissistic personality disorder test which consists of one question: "are you a narcissist?"

A nobody such as yourself should not be asking me this question! Where's the manager?

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