Strangest and most bizzare work interview question and answer!

[wraper]

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?).
.....

With such calculations based on guesses you will easily end up 20 times off the real figure. Giving an answer to such a question would mean that you will figure out some BS instead of saying you need to do a research to give a proper answer.

[Rick Law]

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.

^{Re: "So then, what about the people that have never been in the military and have not been to university?"}

You probably missed the first sentence of that paragraph: "...I would pick a military academy graduate over an otherwise equally qualified "regular" university graduate."

With two equally qualified candidate, the one with less distinguishing qualities is out of luck.  So go the saying: "Luck favors the well prepared."

The whole hiring process is not just about "hiring the right guy" but also to minimize the risk of hiring the wrong guy.  Military Academy grads are known quality.  University grads (from accredited universities) are known quality.  The "known" in the phrase "known qualities" is the operative word in reducing risk.  Military Academies also train every student to be leaders, stress handling, character, endurance... whereas most university would not require leadership training and other positive but non-academic attributes.


^{re: "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 think you need to rewrite your resume/CV.  Be bold, make what you want known in the opening sentence: "I am an xxx engineer with extensive experience and a long successful track record (if that is true)..."

In my view, the most important parts of a resume are: (1) the first sentence of the resume, (2) the first sentence of the last paragraph, and (3) the ending sentence.

Since you think everyone is trying to shaft you, they very well may be!  But you must look inward to figure out why you have such effect on people.

^{re: "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..."}

Same problem afflicts the US businesses.  It is horribly inefficient and filters out many good candidates, but it is what it is.  Live with it, that is life.  Fighting it wont get you anywhere.  Find ways to deal with it.

One way to deal with it would be to target very small companies.  You have a high probability of talking directly to the hiring manager, or perhaps even the owner.

^{re: "I don't want to work here: I work here solely because it's interesting and helps to pay for my test equipment addiction"}

To make yourself happy, what you want clearly is right since you are the decision maker there.  But to make the job in to a success, and to make that lasts, it is more important to understand why the company wants you working there!

[grouchobyte]

Of course for management jobs, it gets a little harder

https://youtu.be/1dWMIuipn_c

[josecamoessilva]

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).

Most of these questions are just "flavor of the day," since someone heard that someone had done it and primate sees, primate does. They are common for business/management jobs because they map directly into a type of business analysis (depending on the question, "ratio chaining" or "hierarchy of effects"). But professional interviewers tend to have objective-driven questions, so this fad too shall pass (as did the "toy puzzle" interviews of the '90s/00s).

To answer the OP, the strangest question I've been asked in a job interview was "How different do you find working in the US from working in Mexico?" to which I answered "I don't know, since I'm from Portugal and never been to Mexico." (It was a headhunting interview, so I didn't care for it anyway, but I would never trust a headhunter to place me who hires such badly prepared interviewers.)

Many moons ago I did some question design for interviews (for the interviewers to use), but they were all of the "here's a problem; this is a proposed solution, what do you think?" where the putative solution had a number of issues and the purpose of the question was to see how many of the issues the candidate could find and correct.

You know, like you do on the job.

[Seekonk]

A friend of mine interviewed a candidate.  The candidate looked around and said this is a nice office, what do I have to do to get it.  He wasn't hired.

[Vtile]

A friend of mine interviewed a candidate.  The candidate looked around and said this is a nice office, what do I have to do to get it.  He wasn't hired.

[chipss]

the qestion was ...
What is the biggest screw up you have ever done at work.....that one had me for a few seconds.

[Seekonk]

It's great to be young and not really care.  I had been pretty much guaranteed a job with a manager who I had worked with in the past and was later employed by. I went to another interview just to keep my options open. I decided to answer every question honestly just for fun. I hadn't heard back from them after a couple weeks so I called one of the engineers I had interviewed with.  He said they hadn't filled the position and he thought I was a good match, but they weren't going to hire me. He wasn't supposed to say anything, but thought some info would help me in future interviews. The report came back that I was too much of a maverick and had a general disregard for the abilities of management. And they say interviewers never get it right.

[Cerebus]

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.

Is this on the level?

[Rick Law]

the qestion was ...
What is the biggest screw up you have ever done at work.....that one had me for a few seconds.

I always ask that exact question.  It is useful to discern how you deal with mistakes, and are you honest about it.  If you learn a valuable lesson from it, it is not a bad mistake.  My follow up is: "what was the biggest lesson you learn from that?"

For people in leadership position, after the "learning from mistake" related questions, I would also ask: "how much did it cost?"  This one is a loaded question.
The one who answer, hmm, I don't know - this candidate is now near the door.
The one who answer, hmm...  $xxx over budget - this candidate is still in, but...
The one who recognizes the cost of a mistake is beyond just the cost of the project alone, but also recognizes it has an impact to the company is the candidate with the most potential.

You may poopoo that, but think about the Samsung Note 7 battery fire fiasco.  Samsung set up a whole test facility and tested hundreds of machines.  That costed tons of money, but compare to the market damage and damage to the image of the company, building and running that test facility is but tiny.


Everyone in the company should keep in mind that what he/she does is important or he/she would not be there.  As such, failure of that would have an impact beyond the immediate project and project staff, however big or small.  That recognition is important.  Any inkling of that recognition shows this guy is not just a pigeon looking for a hole.


A related question is "What was the biggest crisis you had to resolve?"  The follow up question is a trap: "Oh, wow, that was an interesting one!  How often does it happen?" (or similar)

Crisis will happen, you can't prevent them all.  So, there is no issue with that.  But, a crisis should not repeat.  The candidate should have learned from the first time this crisis occurred, and put in measures to prevent it from repeating.  If the same big crisis happened twice, you are missing something.  By the third time, you are not doing your job right.  If the candidate replies: "Oh, it happens every now and again..."  Unless an explanation followed the comment unsolicited, this guy is an idiot.  He/she never learns, or is simply didn't matter to him/her.  If the unsolicited explanation that followed was "it is a pain, but the cost of fixing it is too high", that would have been acceptable.

[Avacee]

Was once being asked some technical questions which got more and more specific - it was obvious they had a issue with something I had experience of and were hunting for a solution.
It was about 11am and I'd booked the whole day as holiday so wasn't in a rush. Told them I'd clocked what they were doing and if they paid me £500 I'd stay and fix the problem and also give their existing staff some training.
During said training it transpired there never was a vacancy and they just wanted some free consultancy from interviewees. 
I wasn't too bothered as I left there with a monkey in my back pocket and was called back many times 

[VEGETA]

It is worth mentioning that they started with that cow question, THEN they started shooting questions about the actual technical job. It was instrumentation planning engineer and I am a Mechatronics engineer.

To tell you the truth, that odd question started-up my brain very well and one way or another helped me in the rest of the interview xD. I got the job as well!

[T3sl4co1l]

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?).
.....

With such calculations based on guesses you will easily end up 20 times off the real figure. Giving an answer to such a question would mean that you will figure out some BS instead of saying you need to do a research to give a proper answer.

20 times?  See-- it's a quite accurate method, much better than guessing!

I mean, if the answer could be literally any natural number, it could be 1, it could be 1,213,796,659, it could be 2, it could be near infinity!

Getting within a factor of 20 is an improbably good guess!

Tim

[BrianHG]

[BrianHG]

[BrianHG]

[Electro Detective]

Strange and bizarre questions resulted in Leon's interview going slightly south in 'Blade Runner'   

[VK3DRB]

This is bizarre but true.

About 3 years ago I was to interview a software engineer. He failed to turn up. He phoned about an hour and a half later to say he could not get off the train at the nearby station because a fat lady was blocking his way and the doors closed before he could get off. He got to the next station and ran to a cab to take him to the interview. He discovered his phone was gone so he had no address. He got out of the cab and retraced his steps, finding the phone in the middle of the road where cars had run over it. He sadly made his way home and looked up our number on his PC.

He asked for another interview. I almost said, "don't worry" but gave him the benefit of the doubt. At the interview, he brought in the phone that the cars had ran over, but I suspected he had hit it with a hammer as an alibi. He showed a technical document he had written. He was from China, had been here about 10 years but his grammar was perfect, better than that of most Australian born engineers (which isn't saying much). It raised suspicions. Even so, he passed a logical thinking test I gave him and he got to the second interview stage.

At the second interview he asked the weirdest question ever: "Can you please check my referees AFTER I get the job, rather than before?" But we checked his references before and they were impressive.

We gave him the job. He turned out to be one of the best engineers I had the pleasure of working with in over 30 years. Very, very smart, and a terrific colleague in that he is a deep thinker with a great personality -  very patient, humble, friendly and generous. His aptitude, attitude, abilities and work ethic were exemplary. One in a million, IMO.

Sadly, I said goodbye to him and everyone else just two days ago. I just left the medical electronics industry to take up another role as an electronic design engineer involving the space industry . To borrow a phrase from the Godfather, I got an offer I couldn't refuse. Even so, I will be keeping in contact with that software engineer and a number of other great people I worked with.

When I was interviewed for the new job, I did say I am the only normal electronic engineer I have ever met. I got the job.

[VK3DRB]

Worst job interview ever involving Steve Jobs at Apple, from the movie "Pirates of Silicon Valley"...

[Landrew2390]

I was interviewing for a job in facilities maintenance and got the two following questions, "How do you feel about the sight of your own blood" and "Does handling dangerous animals cause you anxiety?"

I was being hired as an electrician and I'm not sure the purpose behind the questions, but I guess they liked my answers and gave me the job.  I spent two years there and neither one of those situations came up.

[Rerouter]

"how do you feel about the sight of your own blood" and
"Does handling dangerous animals cause you anxiety?"

I can 100% understand the purpose behind those questions, but i work in bus and truck electronics, bus bodybuilders like to leave hidden screws and razor sharp metal edges behind the dashboard, so i'm well acquainted with the color of my own blood, as for the animals, its generally insect infestations, but there have been 2 snakes.

[VEGETA]

I think the person good for a job should have what they call "soft skills". It is exactly like when Harvey interviewed Mike, first Harvey said that he wanted people to think on their feet not some idiot douche Harvard graduate!

This is EXACTLY what good employers do. All candidates will have a degree and all of them knows how to work with MS Excel... Also, they know how to start an induction motor both the old and the modern way. Also, memorizing op-amp configurations is not really a skill, google is for that. >>> now what is really important is the other skills and personality.

For my employers, I think they saw the Mike Ross in me xD. 

[Housedad]

"Do you have any problems with watching someone eat?"

"Only if they are disgusting pigs"

[Halcyon]

I'm a strong believer of asking questions which are relevant to the job or that speak directly about the character of a person. Not these arbitrary questions which have no "wrong" answer. Questions which have nothing to do with anything are the sign of a bad interviewer/manager who probably did nothing more than Google "interview questions" the night before. I personally wouldn't want to work for someone like that.

I have no doubt some of these interviewers think they are akin to Psychologists. Nothing can be further from the truth.

[Sredni]

I have no doubt some of these interviewers think they are akin to Psychologists. Nothing can be further from the truth.

And even if they were, psychology is not a real science.  ;-]
They are just modern day witchdoctors.
I have always had the impression most "HR" interviewers had just read the Junior Woodchucks Guidebook and were convinced they have the skill to read personalities like they are Freud. (BTW, neither Freud could do that).

Please, stick to chicken entrails, it's quicker and gives the same results.
And you can eat the chicken, after the interview.