Posted on 08/09/2013 10:37:25 AM PDT by Perdogg
It's your worst nightmare: You're on a job interview, they ask you a question and you don't know the answer. Your heart races. Beads of sweat begin to form. C'mon, don't blow it — THINK!
Fun as it is to just show up and panic, it's better to be prepared for the worst. Well, job site Glassdoor.com is out with their annual list of the Top 25 most difficult companies to interview with.
It's like having an older brother who gives you pointers on what to expect from Miss Renkins' calculus exam.
(Excerpt) Read more at cnbc.com ...
There is a flipside to that. I have been asked those questions, and I determined at that moment that I didn’t need the job badly enough to do the tap dance. One time I answered with a blunt “I don’t know” and said nothing else. There was a bit of awkward silence, and then the interviewer moved on.
I was once asked in an interview what Looney Toons character I most closely identified with. Other than Bugs, which is too obvious, there really isn’t a good answer. I think I said Daffy Duck, but only in the role of Duck Dogers. Or that PI character.
Same interview was asked what the airspeed velcity of an unladen swallow was. I knew how to answer that one: “European or African”.
This was a young tech startup in the mid 1990s, and they were looking for a good personality fit. Got the job, but declined in the face of a better offer ..
Yes. It is...
It has to do with how you respond. I need people who are composed when faced with problems they don’t know the answer too. I could care less if they know the answer. It’s a measure of thier composure.
And apparently the arrogant will self-triage out as well.
My last job had an interesting question from the manager. What did I know about ******* ******* System. I told him upfront I had never heard about such a thing. It turned out that it was such a specialized piece of equipment that only two places in the world used it.
I still got the job because I didn’t BS about anything and made a conscientious effort to understand everything that was being asked of me in the interview process.
PS: that was over thirty years ago. My how time flies.
Why are manhole covers round? So they cannot fall through the rimmed hole and kill workers below.
The holes the cover fit into are rimmed all around, about 1” for most I’ve seen. The diameter of the rimmed opening is smaller than the diameter of cover whose edges rest on the rim.
Man hole covers are round because that is the way they have ALWAYS been made. I fear change.
Do I get the job?
NO, it isn’t!!
An you wouldn’t believe this, but I just drove to the grocery store to buy milk, beer and dish detergent (my own recipe of Purple Drank!), and there, 4 1/2 blocks from my house was a... square manhole. On the way back, I stopped the car to verify what my lying eyes had seen, and yes, it was perhaps a childhole, or a Robert B. Reich, too small for a man, about a foot and a half, no id on it, it might have been a cable TV or NSA hole, but square like the girl that Buddy Holly didn’t care for.
As a hiring manager, I always ask this question at the beginning of the interview:
“Tell me what you did to prepare for this interview”.
Do I get the job?
You just made V.P.
Pray for rain?
I distrust anyone who says they’ve never failed.
i use something similar. I'm a Unix nerd. When hiring another Unix nerd, I ask for the most spectacular way they've ever completely destroyed a box by accident.
If you've gotten your hands dirty as a sysadmin for long enough, you will have at least one story to tell. I have one that is quite spectacular that resulted from the improper placement of a single character.
Likewise, I don't trust folks who claim to have never made a mistake.
I have never met an Indian interviewee that will admit to anything more than really, really minor things. Most try to bring up something someone else did.
Because manholes are round.
Because if they were square, they wouldn't fit on manholes.
Me either. Part of being a good leader is being a good follower. Sometimes, you have to tell the boss that his baby is ugly.
So back to the question, "“If I told you to go out and wash all the windows in New York City, how would you go about it?”
My military mind says there isn’t enough information and heading off in the wrong direction is wasteful. So...how many troops do I have? What kind of equipment do I have? What kind of budget do I have? What’s my timeline? When do I have to start and finish?
Then, I’d analyze the info and advise the boss of the feasibility and risks.
Exactly. The answer he’s looking for presupposes that the shape of the cover dictates the shape of the hole. But the fact is, the hole came first and the cover is shaped to match it. The better question would be “Why are manholes round?”
And in fact, the conventional answer — “So the cover doesn’t fall in the hole” — is inadequate. An equilateral triangle would not fall into the hole either. But have you ever tried boring a hole shaped like an equilateral triangle?
This question says more about the interviewer than it does about the interviewee.
Answer: “Does the job require anything to do with manholes or is this just a childish question you think is cute because other people on the Internet claim to be asking the question? Goodbye.”
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