yup...
Posted on 06/22/2013 8:31:47 PM PDT by Vince Ferrer
You can stop counting how many golfballs will fit in a schoolbus now.
Google has admitted that the headscratching questions it once used to quiz job applicants (How many piano tuners are there in the entire world? Why are manhole covers round?) were utterly useless as a predictor of who will be a good employee.
“We found that brainteasers are a complete waste of time,” Laszlo Bock, senior vice president of people operations at Google, told the New York Times. “They don’t predict anything. They serve primarily to make the interviewer feel smart.”
A list of Google questions compiled by Seattle job coach Lewis Lin, and then read by approximately everyone on the entire Internet in one form or another, included these humdingers:
•How much should you charge to wash all the windows in Seattle?
•Design an evacuation plan for San Francisco
•How many times a day does a clock’s hands overlap?
•A man pushed his car to a hotel and lost his fortune. What happened?
•You are shrunk to the height of a nickel and your mass is proportionally reduced so as to maintain your original density. You are then thrown into an empty glass blender. The blades will start moving in 60 seconds. What do you do?
Bock says Google now relies on more quotidian means of interviewing prospective employees, such as standardizing interviews so that candidates can be assessed consistently, and “behavioral interviewing,” such as asking people to describe a time they solved a difficult problem. It’s also giving much less weight to college grade point averages and SAT scores.
(PS: The answer is 500,000)
That is a good one. I’ve been waiting about a week for an opportunity to drop it.
I believe the story explicitly says that the opposite is true.
I had a question like that one time in an interview. Totally inconsistent with the rest of the interview.
I just looked at the guy like he was an idiot. He probably thought I was one as well.
Didn’t get the job and was not really disappointed.
This is not exactly true. The question doesn't say how many hours it takes your planet to rotate around its axis once. Also it doesn't define the length of the day, as opposed to the length of the night. Those are important details :-)
yup...
I’ve had several of these questions. They’re bowlsheet. The only way to approach them is to view it as a way to appease HR. HR doesn’t know crap about debugging or engineering. They like to pretend they do, but they really don’t, because they can’t.
Now lets get rid.of those stupid personality test feel good companies like to use.
Bull and crap.
Riddle me this future employees.
The first big company I had an interview with was for Procter & Gamble.
One of the first “psych” tests was placing a piece of paper in front of the table and all applicants must make an origami figurine, I kid you not.
It was, I heard, ostensibly to find out how the person might approach getting the answer to such a random question, and little interested in an actual answer.
Which overlooks the matter of why don’t the covers overlap the manholes... someone who thought outside the box would, you’d think, be prized by such a brainy firm.
They’ve bought a lot of hooey from modernist experts.
A 4th grader could have told them that. I wonder how much Google paid to have some "research" company tell them that?
IDIOTS!! This is just another reason I refuse to use Google for anything.
It also doesn't take into consideration the second hand. Since the question is unclear as to which hands are included, there cannot be a correct answer.
Which is exactly the opposite of what most high-tech firms prize. Individualists who detour from the "groupthink" tend to be among the first out the door.
Not if you ride the short bus.
LOL!
Thanks. Learned something new. /no sarc
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