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Comment by fduran | Hacker News Reader

> A man pushed his car to a hotel and lost his fortune. What happened?

horrible question, it took me a few seconds to figure out they are talking about the game Monopoly.

Yeah, but why? Nobody should be surprised that familiarity with Monopoly rules is a bad predictor for job performance (and I'm not only saying that because I suck at these).

Not sure what the point of this question is. It seems all it does is to test whether the candidate has heard of Monopoly.

I'm familiar with Monopoly and I didn't think of Monopoly when I read the question.

Simple, the point is to boost the interviewers ego, nothing more. This example is the kind of mean-spirited bullshit that leads me to loathe brain-teasers.

A horrible question for many reasons. It requires not just knowledge of Monopoly, but instant recollection thereof. It says more about the questioner's limited world view (presumes everyone knows about X, where X is irrelevant to the job) than the interviewer's intelligence. It is a learnable answer: skim How Would You Move Mt. Fuji? and similar "clever question" books and you can recall the answer rather than deducing it (the latter being far more important to the job). The worst part, I think, is the automatic dismissal of any creative & applicable "wrong" answer; before seeing the "Monopoly" reference, I was imagining some despairing ex-executive cashing out his life savings, putting it in the car with a can of gasoline, pushing it down a hill into the offending hotel and watching it all go up in smoke ... but because I didn't say "Monopoly", no credit for creativity etc.

On that last point, I recall interviewing at Microsoft: Asked questions about automatic control of venetian blinds, for one question I knew I was missing some obvious simple checkbox-type answer. I told her "I know I'm missing the obvious here, so I'm just gonna pick some alternative solution and talk thru it so you can see how I think" and proceeded to elaborate on a complex yet viable & marketing-impressive implementation. Wasn't gonna let some "correct" answer stand in my way...

Oh, that's what I was supposed to get out of that question? I was probably 5 the last time I played the actual board game. I've played computer versions since then, so pushing the car wasn't even a verb that I'd use to describe the game play. The only interesting aspects of the game for me are the studies about game balance for particular properties. I never aspired to be a great monopoly player, and that shows when I'd play my friends. As an interview question, this one seems pretty lousy.

how horribly culturally specific.

Not necessarily (and actually that would be a terrible answer. The highest rent in Monopoly with a hotel is $2000, and I would hardly call that a "fortune".

The point of the question is to establish how well you gather additional information when the initial description is unsatisfactory. Anyone who's been an engineer knows you have to do this every single day.

(Not that it's a good interview question.)

Monopoly was first published in 1935 and the prices haven't increased since. That makes the cost of a stay at the most expensive hotel $34,000 in today's money, which is far more than I'd ever pay to stay at a real hotel...

Ignoring inflation, you can compare the price of staying at that hotel with buying the land it's built on for a relative estimation of the cost.

Especially since I always picked the top-hat.

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