
Top 25 Oddball Interview Questions Of 2010 - pierrefar
http://www.glassdoor.com/blog/top-25-oddball-interview-questions-2010/
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arepb
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.

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latch
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)?

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aplusbi
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.

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edw519
26\. How many times would you click "View Answers" before you say, "Fuck this"
and close your browser?

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

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

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

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

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

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Adrock
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.

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

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toxicflavor
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.

