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Comment by pjmlp | Hacker News Reader

Here a few additional teasers,

- How many golf balls fit into the plane

- How many gas stations exist in country (or alternative version with city)

- How many turns do you have to go on a gum machine until colour comes out?

Naturally they all evaluate properly the skills required for the job, and other professions get asked the same kind of stupid questions.

Unless it is for a position I really, really want, or are unemployed and every opportunity counts, that is usually where the interview ends for me.

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See how you fare with these:

https://subway-kann.exe.xyz/

Oh yeah the estimation problems are terrible. The probability ones are at least notionally trying to test your math skills. But still pretty far from being relevant in almost all cases.

Having had to estimate peak user traffic patterns, bandwidth usage, etc. for continent-scale services, Fermi estimation questions (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_problem) are excellent questions for people working at the largest scales. Even if the guessed inputs or formula for the estimate are imperfect, being able to bang out an approximate formula that can brought out for discussion with peers and refined into something that can be agreed upon as a target is extremely valuable. It's not a useful skill for everyone but for those aspiring to be more than a mere coder, it's worth knowing.

Years ago, I read a book titled How Would You Move Mount Fuji? [0] about the cult of Fermi Questions [1]. These are questions where you're looking for an order of magnitude. The cult of Fermi Questions in Silicon Valley started with William Shockley [2] using them in interviews. Several of his smart dudes quit to start companies you may have heard of like Intel, AMD & Fairchild [3].

Notes:

0 - https://www.amazon.com/dp/0316778494

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_problem And not the question Where are they? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox Same guy. At the same Los Alamos.

2 - You know, the guy who got a Nobel Prize for inventing transistors. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Shockley

3 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traitorous_eight

Not everyone dreams to found the next unicorn, real life for most of us isn't the Silicon Valley TV series.

Just like not every cook wants to be a Michelin star with molecular cuisine, a tiny food drop in the middle of a gigantic plate.

I think those questions are good ways to assess open mindedness, estimation, and verbal communication skills.

There are other ways to assess those skills, sure. But questions like that aren’t bad ways.

Things that open-ended are ripe for abuse, which is to say when you have a team of white techbros, guess which candidates get high marks on these ad-hoc questions?

Hot Asian milfs?

From the comment I was replying to:

> Unless it is for a position I really, really want, or are unemployed and every opportunity counts, that is usually where the interview ends for me

This person is close minded and is filtering themselves out of the process. This is ideal.

Are you saying you’re against all open-ended questions in the interview process?

I agree with pjmlp, it's become a substitute for actually interviewing/evaluating the candidate. Especially if they are trying to hire for something they don't already have, it's a form of bikeshedding. For example, if they need a database expert because the team has been faking it until this point, they can either learn how to hire one, or they can focus on brain teasers and "culture fit", and feel good that whether or not the person is expert, they passed the test.

Ideal would be if the questions are actually job related, how many other professions do you think get these kind of stupid questions?

Since we are it, lets make Jeopardy for getting a job.

Companies are groups of people behaving a certain way, and jobs are behaving that way. As an outsider, you don't know what the job is. If the interview is a bunch of questions you think is stupid, then the job is probably doing a bunch of stuff you think is stupid. If you want the money and prestige anyway, then learn to do the stupid stuff.

Which is why, as mentioned, unless I am desperate for a job, I walk out.

Or maybe the job is about actually carrying golf balls into planes.

I bet it is about solving the daily brain teaser of working with unmaintainable code!

I thought we had Fable for that now.

You understand that this is a job interview working as intended? You may be awesome at the work but your values do not align with the company’s and it’s best if you don’t work there.

So if somebody tried to solve the brainteaser with an impossibly high likelihood of being completely wrong. You get the signal that their values match yours, they are open minded and that they are good at writing great programs?

I do understand that these are stupid ways to achieve that goal.

Again, I’m not saying that job related questions are bad. I’m saying that these types of questions can be good. You can ask more than 1 type of question!

Mostly of the same basket and equally bad, on my experience, because usually it is some dude or gal, that rather be coding than doing interviews that gets dragged to question this guy that just dropped on reception for the interview.

Its funny how some people react to these?

I suspect you see them as time wasters which is why you end the interview. I see them as ice-breakers and rather enjoy them because they are fun to talk through.

I am on my 50's now, if I have to prove that I am worthwhile being an employee with such teasers instead of what I have done thus far, I rather spend my time elsewhere, unless I am desperate for getting the position.

Yeah, I was recently asked to do a coding assignment for a company I wasn't even sure I wanted to work for. Sorry, but I'm not going to start an interview process with extra work. I'd do it if I was really sure I wanted to work there, but that's something I discover during the interview process.

Honestly that may be just the reaction the company was hoping for which is both valuable for you and them. You save time not going through an interview for a place you might dislike and they get to move on quickly.

Yeah I can see people using these as proxies for age discrimination

Seniors are not welcomed by most companies, because we already seen all movies management pulls up employees to trick them "doing more with less".

Ironically the same companies are more than willing to get the same seniors as highly paid external contractors for exactly the same tasks, and without these kind of time wasting interviews.

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