Wacky interview questions

M$: 1.Define diaper. As in adult, children, paper, cloth, etc. 2.So it doesnt fall down the hole it is covering.

Amazon: Depends on how much PHP I have to write.

Google: Define cow. Does it only apply to the common animal or does it also apply to the slang used to refer to overweight people?

Zillow: Define success.

Expedia: Which language version for the T9 keypad? In what language do the words have to be found?

“If you were to get rid of one state in the US, which would it be and why?

Define "rid".

“How many cows are in Canada?”

Define cow. Does it only apply to the common animal or does it also apply to the slang used to refer to overweight people?

“How many quarters would you need to reach the height of the Empire State building?”

Define the specific quarter used for the exercise. Also, tell me the temperature at which the exercise will be done.

“A penguin walks through that door right now wearing a sombrero. What does he say and why is he here?

What type of penguin, and sombrero?

“What songs best describes your work ethic?”

What genres are allowed?

“Jeff Bezos walks into your office and says you can have a million dollars to launch your best entrepreneurial idea. What is it?”

Define best.

“What do you think about when you are alone in your car?”

Is the car ON? Am I driving somewhere? If so, Where?

“How would you rate your memory?”

Which type of memory (short/mid/long-term?)?

“Name 3 previous Nobel Prize Winners.”

Can it be for the same Nobel Prize?

“Can you say: ’Peter Pepper Picked a Pickled Pepper’ and cross-sell a washing machine at the same time?”

When do you want the Washing Machine delivered?

“If we came to your house for dinner, what would you prepare for us?”

Are you allergic to any type of food?

“How would people communicate in a perfect world?”

Define perfect world.

“How do you make a tuna sandwich?”

Which type of tuna sandwhich?

“My wife and I are going on vacation, where would you recommend?”

Are you going together?

“You are a head chef at a restaurant and your team has been selected to be on Iron Chef. How do you prepare your team for the competition and how do you leverage the competition for your restaurant?

When is the competition?

“Estimate how many windows are in New York.”

Are we refering to regular windows or computing devices running the operating system Windows? Plus, define Window. Is it an opening in a wall? Does it need to have a glass plane?

“What’s your favorite song? Perform it for us now.” Define favorite (as in top 10 ranking, overall, etc.). Define perform (sing, sing+dance, dance, mime, etc.).

“Calculate the angle of two clock pointers when time is 11:50.”

AM or PM?

“Have you ever stolen a pen from work?”

Define stolen.

“Pick two celebrities to be your parents.”

Define celebrities.

“What kitchen utensil would you be?”

Define utensil (mechanical, electric, electronic, etc). Define kitchen (commercial, American, European, etc.).

“If you had turned you cell phone to silent, and it rang really loudly despite it being on silent, what would you tell me?”

Which cellphone (brand, type, OS, etc)?

“On a scale from one to ten, rate me as an interviewer.”

Does the scale go from best to worst or otherwise?

“If you could be anyone else, who would it be?”

Define be.

“How would you direct someone else on how to cook an omelet?”

Are they disabled in any way?

Of course it matters. The ask to make the calculation when its 11:50. I need to know if I'm free to be able to go and calculate it at exactly 11:50. I would not want to do the calculation at 11:49 or 11:51, because then I could be missing another calculation appointment.

Using when implies that I do the calculation at the exact point in space-time, and not calculate the angle of the clock pointers at the moment the clock marks 11:50.

:)

"Candidate is contrarian for the sake of being contrarian, and avoided answering all questions."

I know you're joking, and there is value to getting the interviewer to clarify the question and confirm assumptions.

But some of your responses ("define be") are nitpicky to the point of "this guy wouldn't be any fun to work with".

Side note:

I watched a once-coworker give a 30 minute lecture to high school students on how to do these giant puzzle/estimation types. His trick was to take the geometric mean of reasonable min/max bounds at different stages of the estimation.

Example question: How many flights occur in America in a day?

You can start from the bottom, with an estimate of the number of people who fly, then the number that can fit in a plane, et cetera. Alternatively, you can start from the top at the number of airports and their flight capacity. With a bunch of sqrt(minbound*maxbound) and reasonable guessing, the students (via groupthink) ended up with two roughly matching estimates that were within an order of magnitude.

Which would be more impressive: that I long ago memorized that the Earth's mass is about ~5.98E24 kg or that I could estimate it knowing Kepler's third law (T-squared = C * R-cubed) and orbital information about the Moon(28d@250,000miles), Earth (365d@1AU), and Mercury (88d@0.4AU), where 1AU=93million miles. Or that I could cross-check it by knowing the circumference of 25,000 miles to get the approximate volume, and knowing that the density is around 5tons/cubic meter? Or I could use the orbital numbers to estimate G then knowing that Earth's surface gravity is 9.81m/s/s then I can also get M_earth.

All of those involve memorized numbers, and most require physics knowledge. But I have a feeling that the more complicated ones would impress them more, and make them more likely to hire me. If that's the case, then my strategy is not to give the answer which I know, but to exaggerate the difficulty by hiding my actual knowledge.

GDP? It's about the size of the debt, which is something like 7 trillion, so I would have estimated $10 trillion. (Actually, the debt is $12, and the GDP is $15.) I might have double-checked my answer because I think the budget is about $4 trillion, and 20% of GDP giving $20 trillion. (Actually 3.54 trillion and 22.6% GDP).

How is this memorized knowledge useful? Especially since I don't know how the GDP is actually calculated? Nor the difference between GNP and GDP. So this mostly tests to see if I've paid attention to the economic news. It's almost like asking me if I know the hottest temperature ever recorded in Death Valley.

And as for the London Underground - too many variables for me to even estimate. Turns out to be 4134, and that what I thought was part of the Underground was actually rail services. If forced, I think would have said: 20 rail lines? (Actually, 11.) At rush hour, 10 cars separated by 5 minutes distance, for a total of about 90 minutes per line? Which gives 3600 cars. I probably would have rounded up to 4,000 for spares, and then been amazed at how close I was. (Ahh, I forgot the factor of two because trains are going in both directions. And I think the inter-train spacing is less than 5 minutes on some of the lines.)

But this only works because I've been to London and made those observations. Without that experience, I would be off by an order of magnitude.

So there you go - this proves that I have a degree in physics, that I follow the news, and that I've visited London. It helps with the job you applied to because ... ?

(And if you say it's because I can reason about these sorts of problems, then, see "have a degree in physics" and add "and also math.")