Google admits those infamous brainteasers were completely useless for hiring

Quartz ^ | June 20, 2013 | Adam Pasick

[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)

[PuzzledInTX]

•How many times a day does a clock’s hands overlap?

I'd say that the hands overlap at all times at the center of the clock.

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks Vince Ferrer.

They don’t predict anything. They serve primarily to make the interviewer feel smart.

No, the absurdities serve primarily as a method to winnow out people who can't be herded along into "consensus".

[HiTech RedNeck]

Once they begin to worship their brains and stop using them to seek objective truths, this kind of thing happens. It’s snobbery of course.

[HiTech RedNeck]

Or who weren’t “lucky” enough to be in the “correct” thought stream before they came.

I interviewed last year with another brainiac firm. I ended up not getting hired. A bummer then, as I badly needed a job, but I am now working for a humbler firm that pays more and it was clearly orchestrated by the good Lord.

[Lazamataz]

I was asked to come up with some Google questions. I did. This is what I submitted:

1. Would Laz hit it? How often and why?
2. How many hits would a Laz-hit hit, if a Laz-hit could hit it?
3. Translate this Latin phrase: "Veni, Vidi, Hit-ci."
4. Please relate the propensity of Laz to hit it as a function of SexyBack, Lackanooky Factor, and the NaughtyTeacher Series?
5. You are a cute female. You have only a spool of thread, a pair of rubber gloves, a quart of apple juice, three monkeys, one Sterilite 5 gallon tub full of grape jam, a trampoline, and a midget. You see Laz approaching. What do you do?

[castlegreyskull]

Is a paper airplane considered “origame”? Could make one and throw it at them.

[Joan Kerrey]

I went through a few of these tests.
On one test I remember I was given two pictures, one directly below the other. I was told to list all the differences between the two pictures. The pictures were quite complex with lots of buildings and objects to look at.

I answered after looking at the pictures closely but briefly that there were no differences. NONE, I answered.

Later the interviewer said that I was the only one who answered correctly. She said that if not stopped some interviewees would have spent days trying to find differences that didn’t exist.

[Jabba the Nutt]

LOL. Funny.

[Jabba the Nutt]

The answer is zero. I used a digital clock.

[savedbygrace]

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?

I'd use my super powers and jump out of the blender.

[savedbygrace]

Why Marine veterans have a hard time getting a job:

Job Interview

Personnel Manager: “What is your greatest
weakness?”

Old Marine: “Honesty.”

Personnel Manager: “I don’t think honesty is a weakness!”

Old Marine: “I don’t give a sh!t what you think.”

[Cyber Liberty]

... they didn't want the real answer, they wanted the answer they wanted.

Correct. Which tells you Google isn't any different from any other giant company out there, despite what they'll tell you. They are trying to find something out about your thinking process with a question like that, but it's not about how you solve problems. They want to know if you will stay safely inside the intellectual range of your boss, or will you be a loose cannon.

[Chode]

pretty much...

[max americana]

LOL, we were all thinking about it, too. The other guys beside me wanted to walk out thinking it was BS.

[Intolerant in NJ]

I believe the story explicitly says that the opposite is true...well it does seem to say that, yet they go on to talk about their new ways of judging interviewees, including "behavioral interviewing" - getting them to describe a time they solved "a difficult problem" - I would think observing people trying to solve such a problem as in a brainteaser would be a more valid and reliable method of evaluating their abilities than having them talk about it - does the interviewee try to get more information from the interviewer, does he try to find a logical method of arriving at an answer, does he become so irritated by the stress of the situation that he starts to mishandle simple steps like incorrectly spelling easy words - these are some of the behaviors that might be lost in having somebody only talk about how they solve problems and could help predict if someone might be a good employee - I think they could anyway.......

[HiTech RedNeck]

yep... you’d be able to jump out like a grasshopper

[1010RD]

No, but it does give insight into the self-worship techies often experience. They like control. It’s why so many of them are into porn.