Strangest and most bizzare work interview question and answer!

[VEGETA]

Hi guys,

We all survived many interviews but there are always THAT strange odd question which is not only off-topic but just so damn strange... I think you know what I mean, and I will start this by showing mine. So basically, just state the question and your answer to it.

Q: How many cows does Canada have?
A: I don't know since it is not famous of having cows, but Switzerland has 600,000 cows. I won't give a guess answer so if you need one, I will have to do research for it.


Now please share yours!

[vk6zgo]

Hi guys,

We all survived many interviews but there are always THAT strange odd question which is not only off-topic but just so damn strange... I think you know what I mean, and I will start this by showing mine. So basically, just state the question and your answer to it.

Q: How many cows does Canada have?
A: I don't know since it is not famous of having cows, but Switzerland has 600,000 cows. I won't give a guess answer so if you need one, I will have to do research for it.


Now please share yours!

I wonder what this cow obsession is all about!

Not an interview question,but I have recently seen a promo for a TV show which states that "All the cows in the world face in the same direction"!

It is patently untrue, as you only have to drive into the country to see cows in a field facing all sorts of directions.

Apparently, someone did a study from looking at Google Earth to make this assertion, putting it down to a "Magnetic sense"  .

Googling, you get the barefaced assertion on some sites, but on others they weasel out a bit, & say "when they are moving in herds".

All of which leads me to suggest a good answer to the question " How many cows does Canada have?" might be:-

"Dunno,but they are all facing North!"

[EEVblog]

I had an interview once where the interviewer sat down and just sat there and said nothing and just stared at me.
I thought cool, I'll play this game, and stared back and smiled without saying a word. I won, he spoke first after about a minute.

[metrologist]

Why should I hire you?
Because I am God and can walk on water.

[Rick Law]

Hi guys,

We all survived many interviews but there are always THAT strange odd question which is not only off-topic but just so damn strange... I think you know what I mean, and I will start this by showing mine. So basically, just state the question and your answer to it.

Q: How many cows does Canada have?
A: I don't know since it is not famous of having cows, but Switzerland has 600,000 cows. I won't give a guess answer so if you need one, I will have to do research for it.


Now please share yours!

This is from one of Bill Gates early books (1980-1990) on Microsoft management style/techniques.  I think the book title is "The Microsoft Way" but I am not positive.  20+ years ago memory, so, if memory serves:

The example Gates used in his book was "How many gas stations are in the United States?"  Depending on answer and if appropriate, followed by "How did you come up with that answer?"  In his book, he explained that he is not interested in the exact answer but instead interested in how the candidate reacts to such question, and if the candidate manages to find a reasonable way to deduce an answer - or not.

I too have use variation of such question when I interviewed candidates.

[T3sl4co1l]

As with all shitty interview questions, they're actually asking if you can estimate, and if so, provide an example.

You quite explicitly stated that, no, you cannot, and won't even try.  Fair enough.

(Shitty interview questions, in general, are also asking if you can read between the lines.)

A typical solution would read:
Canada is about 10M people. (Underestimate?)
A person eats about a pound a day of beef (over?) and a gallon of milk (over?).
(Remember 10 milk makes 1 cheese, and cheese is in a lot of stuff, like pizza.  If a person eats 0.1 pound of cheese, that's about 1 gallon.  Oh, and a gallon is about 10 pounds.)
A cow makes about 1000 pounds of beef (slightly over), or 1 gallon/day of milk (under?).  So a cow can feed 1000 people at once when slaughtered, or 1 person/day when milked.
Still need to convert cow mass to rate.  It probably takes about a year to raise a cow, which is a half* of 1000 days.  So again the rate is about 1 cow per person.

*A logarithmic half, i.e., sqrt(10)/10 or 0.316.  But such precision is not allowed in the estimate.

So 10M people fed by 20M cows seems reasonable.

Note this doesn't count exports.  Estimating that would be a different matter.

One could niggle that "cows" were asked for, in which case only milk would apply (steers are slaughtered, and cows when they're too old).  I think... IANARancher.

Checking, http://www.agr.gc.ca/redmeat/rpt/tbl40_eng.htm says 12 million head of cattle in 2014.  Not bad.  Canada's population is 35 million, so the human/cow ratio was estimated wrong.  (A case of reaching the right answer from the wrong premises.  An estimate is an estimate!)

Tim

[EEVblog]

The example Gates used in his book was "How many gas stations are in the United States?"  Depending on answer and if appropriate, followed by "How did you come up with that answer?"  In his book, he explained that he is not interested in the exact answer but instead interested in how the candidate reacts to such question, and if the candidate manages to find a reasonable way to deduce an answer - or not.

Yes, it's usually about the reaction. i.e. Did  they react right away, and how so, or did they freeze and look dumbfounded (even if answering later).

[EEVblog]

I was once asked what my favourite movie was, I of course snapped back with Back To The Future.
He said he was looking to see if I was swayed by recent popular social opinion (Forest Gump was the hit that year, and answering such deemed a fail  )

[Rick Law]

I was once asked what my favourite movie was, I of course snapped back with Back To The Future.
He said he was looking to see if I was swayed by recent popular social opinion (Forest Gump was the hit that year, and answering such deemed a fail  )

That kinds of question is rather a compliment.  I had thought those kinds of questions went by the way side because now hiring for work-life long is rare.

In today's hiring for projects and job ends with the project, it is far more important what you know now and what you can do immediately.  But, back in the days when one's first college job could last decades or perhaps even until retirement, it was more important to discern the candidate's attributes - not what a candidate can do now but to find out the candidate's potential to be more.

That they were asking you about a movie shows they were interested in you as a person - a compliment.

I am no management guru.  I am now retired, but looking back I personally like to use "odd questions" to discern how the candidate is as a person. Odd questions get the candidate off guard and thus more likely to informative.

[Ampera]

There aren't any cows in Canada, they are all holograms.

[VEGETA]

As Dave said, it is about reaction and how you deal with such questions when more senior people around.

[Rick Law]

As Dave said, it is about reaction and how you deal with such questions when more senior people around.

It is about the reaction, but not just about the reaction.

Follow up questions can give information about how the candidate thinks.  Questions such as: "I can understand you don't know how many gas stations are in the USA.  If I give you a day, how would you find out?"  Knowing how the candidate would approach something unknown is an important factor.

When it is not hiring merely for a project, what you are is more important than what you can do now.

There was a discussion on this forum some time ago regarding hiring and I expressed my view that I would pick a military academy graduate over an otherwise equally qualified "regular" university graduate.  That is because their being a military academy grad made a very loud statement about who they are: someone you can count on and someone who is no idiot.  Just the process of applying for the academy (West Point, Naval Academy, Air Force Academy) send the student through stuff that most college-bound student would be unprepared for.

When it is not merely "just for a project", what the person is made of counts and counts a lot and "odd ball" questions can reveal a lot beyond the immediate reactions.

Payscale.com "Best Universites and Colleges by Salary Potential" for bachelors degree perhaps also reflects my sentiment:
MIT ranks #2
Princeton ranks #3
Stanford ranks #5
West Point ranks #6
US Naval Academy ranks #7
US Air Force Academy ties with U of Penn both rank #8
Harvard ranks #10
UC Berkeley ranks #26
Virginia Military Institute (VMI) ranks #36

_{Reference: http://www.payscale.com/college-salary-report/bachelors}

[dimkasta]

Nothing out of the ordinary for my interviews.

 But most annoying q for me was the rather cliche
"How do you see youself in 5 years"

I would love to have answered with something like...
"Fat"

I actually said something like
"Being an important part of the ... team or leading it if I am given the opportunity"

Big sharks around here in Greece had other ideas for us, but hey... At least I got fat [emoji14]

[grouchobyte]

I was once asked...

We like people who are non-smokers with a sense of humor....How do you feel about that?
I rapidly answered....I guess this means I can't work here
They then asked....so you smoke?

I said..... heck no, I have no sense of humor
They hired me.

@grouchobyte

[mc172]

It is about the reaction, but not just about the reaction.

<snip>

Virginia Military Institute (VMI) ranks #36

_{Reference: http://www.payscale.com/college-salary-report/bachelors}

So then, what about the people that have never been in the military and have not been to university, yet design the equipment that the military in your country use in combat and to train with? Are they "prepared"? Prepared for what, though - someone approaching quickly with a machete?


I think the current candidate has been dealt a bad hand. Managers conducting the interviews seem to have a pre-conception that they've got to ask these stupid, impossible to answer questions and don't even understand what answer they are expecting, let alone what the answer consists of. Whether it's to seem intelligent or something, I have no idea. I have no desire to manage anything other than my own power dissipation.

Most of the stupid questions I've been asked are along the lines of:
Why do you want to work for this company - erm, it isn't rocket surgery
Tell me how you interact/work with others - as little as possible please, especially management as they are probably incompetent
Where do you see yourself in x years - dead hopefully
Tell me about a difficult situation you've had to overcome blah blah - er, getting out of bed to come and see your bland mug?
...But I think I've got off quite lightly.

What winds me up is that very rarely do the vast majority of the organisation realise that I'm an engineer. I'm a socially inept recluse and think that everyone else is hell-bent on either talking to me about my feelings or shafting me - both of which are a nightmare situation. I don't want to work here: I work here solely because it's interesting and helps to pay for my test equipment addiction. If I end up with a bit of spare money, it's to pay for the silicon I'm about to blow up.
Inevitably you're first interviewed by someone in HR that has no idea of your potential job description, let alone what you'll be doing, however your answer to some stupid questions like "what colour was the jam on my toast this morning?" decides whether you make it to round 2 or not. It's a load of crap, but I look at it like this: if that's the case then there are probably other, more significant things happening, which may suggest that you might not want to work there.


Something I've noticed is that different companies treat the whole hiring process and subsequent probation period very, very differently. More so than I would have expected - I know each company does things their own way but this attitude is completely unpredictable from my experience. Some see it as you being there from day one means you're there forever, whereas others see it as a true three month trial period whereby if you are a complete clown, you're out.

[rstofer]

What winds me up is that very rarely do the vast majority of the organisation realise that I'm an engineer. I'm a socially inept recluse and think that everyone else is hell-bent on either talking to me about my feelings or shafting me - both of which are a nightmare situation. I don't want to work here: I work here solely because it's interesting and helps to pay for my test equipment addiction. If I end up with a bit of spare money, it's to pay for the silicon I'm about to blow up.
Inevitably you're first interviewed by someone in HR that has no idea of your potential job description, let alone what you'll be doing, however your answer to some stupid questions like "what colour was the jam on my toast this morning?" decides whether you make it to round 2 or not. It's a load of crap, but I look at it like this: if that's the case then there are probably other, more significant things happening, which may suggest that you might not want to work there.

That's where I come out!  I don't have a sense of humor that I am aware of and the only reason I want the job is to make a bunch of money.  So, let's talk about salary and stock options.

And don't tell me about the 'team' approach!  We're all in this separately!

[timb]

What winds me up is that very rarely do the vast majority of the organisation realise that I'm an engineer. I'm a socially inept recluse and think that everyone else is hell-bent on either talking to me about my feelings or shafting me - both of which are a nightmare situation. I don't want to work here: I work here solely because it's interesting and helps to pay for my test equipment addiction. If I end up with a bit of spare money, it's to pay for the silicon I'm about to blow up.
Inevitably you're first interviewed by someone in HR that has no idea of your potential job description, let alone what you'll be doing, however your answer to some stupid questions like "what colour was the jam on my toast this morning?" decides whether you make it to round 2 or not. It's a load of crap, but I look at it like this: if that's the case then there are probably other, more significant things happening, which may suggest that you might not want to work there.

That's where I come out!  I don't have a sense of humor that I am aware of and the only reason I want the job is to make a bunch of money.  So, let's talk about salary and stock options.

And don't tell me about the 'team' approach!  We're all in this separately!

Remember, there's no "Me" in team!

[poida_pie]

I love it when someone says "there is no I in TEAM"
I can just, and only just stop myself from replying "but there is a U in CxNT"

[xrunner]

https://youtu.be/5nNWIVkLJ-M

[Ampera]

I love it when someone says "there is no I in TEAM"
I can just, and only just stop myself from replying "but there is a U in CxNT"

I can't stop imagining a W at the start of any Anker products.

[Brumby]

Reminds me of the computer company - Wang - who came up with a slogan:



Didn't last long I believe.

[German_EE]

A couple of years ago I posted this, maybe it's still valid for this thread:

"Where do you see yourself in X years time"?  The electronics industry changes from month to month and if I could predict five years into the future I would be playing the stock markets instead of attending job interviews.

"What is your greatest weakness"? Well, that would be my passionate desire for Sigorney Weaver's company, either that or my chronic kleptomania.

"What is your greatest strength"? Being able to answer silly interview questions without beating to death the person responsible.

"What is your favorite color"? Blood red, especially when lit by moonlight. Did you know that blood when lit by moonlight is quite black Mr Interviewer?

"What is your favorite computer language"? Solder (thank you Bob Pease)

"You’re in a desert walking along in the sand when all of the sudden you look down, and you see a tortoise, it’s crawling toward you. You reach down, you flip the tortoise over on its back. The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over, but it can’t, not without your help. But you’re not helping. Why is that"? Because I like freshly roasted tortoise.

And now a real one......................

"The stock control system has crashed, the yard is filled with delivery trucks waiting to load up and nothing is moving in or out of the warehouse, what do you do"? The correct answer here is 'ask for help' because the company needs the system up and running as quickly as possible and delays will cost much more than emergency assistance from a qualified database administrator.

[chris_leyson]

Went for an interview for short term holiday job back in the 70's, civil engineering related. I was asked if I had noticed the time on the square, it's a freemason thing apparently.

[T3sl4co1l]

And now a real one......................

"The stock control system has crashed, the yard is filled with delivery trucks waiting to load up and nothing is moving in or out of the warehouse, what do you do"? The correct answer here is

[Vtile]

I love it when someone says "there is no I in TEAM"

It is a language dependent.