“What would you say about someone that owned 18 pinball machines?”

You’re hired!

The why are man hole covers round can really mess with people. Also the question “How many street lights are there in (insert city here)?” is super revealing.

Round so they will not fit and fall through the hole. A square would fall through if rotated to the corner to corner direction of the opening.

Some guys like to follow up with prove it, just to see if people can make the connection. I like to leave it as a freebie for anyone that has actually been in one.

2 trains are travelling towards each other on the same First Continental Railroad track. The train leaving Sioux City, Iowa is going 45 mph and the train leaving Portland, Oregon is going 48 mph, neither train has working brakes. A bald eagle is flying back-and-forth between the trains at 35 mph. How far does the eagle fly before the trains collide?

How far apart are they ? Lol

Will you come sit on my lap?

signed Harvey Weinstein

You are taking the interview questionnaire in an office by yourself with no internet access or phone and no one to ask questions to.

In my second interview for my current job I was asked only one question. What’s the differences between .223 and 5.56?

That question has nothing to do with the position I applied for / have now

5.337

Do you have a PHD or licensed electrician ? because we are offering minimum wage plus a dollar

I hate these kind of interview questions. Honestly, at least for my field (remote software engineering); the most important skill is communication (software is complex and not being there in person means you gotta communicate frequently but effectively across many channels). So, for my hires I’ve made sure they a.) haven’t bullshitted their resume and b.) can communicate to me a project they worked on, challenges they faced, how they overcame the challenges, etc.

Whether someone can come up with an on the spot clever answer to a manhole cover style problem is mostly a luck based thing; I’d rather have a very high level discussion about actual projects someone’s executed.

"Name atleast one Beatle."

When I used to interview experienced people, I’d hit them with this one:

“Tell me about a time when you made a mistake at work, how you fixed it, and what you learned from it.”

I don’t want to hire people who’ve never made a mistake - it means they’ve never taken risks. If they seem reluctant to answer, I give them an example from my past. That helps loosen up the interview too, because we’re both admitting we’re human.

Is 99124571204 divisible by 9

I had a guy at the end of an interview ask how I would maintain a system that cost several hundred thousand dollars.I responded I have never seen this system so I wouldnt touch it.He responded CORRECT.Another interview I was asked to stand up and spin around,Sounds like he may have been used to people doing that.Good Sign its the wrong place for me.

A lot of these unreasonable questions are sometimes asked to see how you react when you don’t know the answer to something.

I think the best questions involve what would you do in this situation.Or to identify tools, parts or systems.

I also tend to put people who maintain eye contact while speaking and listening in the front of the line

I think I mentioned this in the past... I worked at a .com back in the day.

They were desperate to hit their "growth" numbers to get more investment money so we were hiring like crazy.

If you walked in the door and weren't a moron you were going to get hired and we were all 100% sick of doing interviews.

I can remember asking people what they would order if we were at a Chinese restaurant and all kinds of pointless crap.

Just screwing with people who were going to get hired anyways unless they picked their nose in front of me.

Isn’t everything??

Pressure.

To fly back and forth between the trains, the eagle would need to fly faster than the trains.

Now that’s funny.

I don’t need any internet or calculator to realize there is not enough information.

As a young lad, I walked into a movie theater/bar looking for a job. The proprietor said "Have you ever projected movies?" No I replied. "Have you ever been a bartender?" No. I was hired. Because I was fascinated by the 35mm projector and it's inner workings, that hire led me into over 20 years as a theater projection installer throughout New England.

What... is your name?

What... is your quest?

What... is your favourite colour?

My favorite.
Boss. "Here is my watch.Sell it back to me"
Job Candidate "How much will you give me to get your watch back?"

If they haven’t seen Airplane they don’t get the job…

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New parameters. Now say that the eagle flies at 55 mph and starts in Sioux City, Iowa and carries a tiny news video recorder to film the train collision. The track between Sioux City, IOWA and Portland, Oregon is 1600 miles. An eagle can only fly 1000 miles before tiring. Does the eagle get the accident footage?

The manhole cover is a basic understanding of Pythagorean theorem I think that is a pretty basic question for a software engineer.

Questions that would annoy me is asking, Asian people to write code to detect a palindrome. A palindrome makes no sense when your first language is symbol based. I hate when interviewers get into dick swinging scenarios with shit like that.

The other peeve is people that don’t understand people are nervous as shit and just need a few minutes of conversation before you start. You gotta put people in situations to succeed.

I was going for a computer programmer position and in my first job interview ever the guy asked "are you a people person?" and I replied "not really". That pretty much killed it.

"A carload of lesbians leaves Chicago at 5PM on a Thursday headed for Dallas.

At the exact same time on the same day, a carful of gay guys leaves Dallas headed for Chicago.

They each travel the exact same route.

Who arrives first?
Answer: the car full of lesbians.

Explain why.

Because the lesbians drove lickity split."

I’ve used that one, but I always explain what a palindrome is. A developer who can’t think of a text string as an array and work with that probably isn’t going to make it.

Where do you see yourself in 5years? -not here.

Genius !

Yeah I hate that question. I’m not a 5 year plan type of guy.....I guess I’m not getting the job lol

"Where do you see yourself in 5 years?"

"Sitting in that chair if I do a thorough enough job of hiding your body."

You can explain but it still only makes sense to people that use the Latin alphabet, everybody else your just putting them on the wrong foot. It’s a mind fuck for Asian people and a total softball for everybody else. If someone asked it in an interview today I would overrule it and move on. It’s just a bad look.

And another: If you were a cowboy, which way would you ride?

Software developer interview question. How can you find the second to last element in a null terminated array?

For electrical engineers, my father told me this is one they would ask sometimes when he was working:
What is Ohm’s law?

Not an EE and without looking it up: V = IR?

You would care if you had to go shooting, and wanted to avoid popped primers.

This is a software developer interview question I have actually asked. The candidate said "I don't know". On a Windows platform, what are some methods/approaches you can use for 2 separate processes to communicate?