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Top 25 Oddball Interview Questions Of 2010

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11–13 of 13 posts

Re: Top 25 Oddball Interview Questions Of 2010

#11
post #9

Seems like there are two distinct type of questions in the list. The first are math-based and seem to have real value, like this one from amazon: "If you had 5,623 participants in a tournament, how many games would need to be played to determine the winner?" The rest (in significant portions) fall in the more philosophical "how would you move mount fuji". I've never been asked this type of question, I hope I never am…

Those questions can show you if someone is willing to call out an interviewer for asking a stupid question. I doubt the people asking these kinds of questions are looking for that sort of answer however.

Re: Top 25 Oddball Interview Questions Of 2010

#12
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And to top it off, a link bait title "Top %d %s of 2010".

http://www.google.com/search?q=headlines+linkbait

Which are, not surprisingly, some of the headline structures that pulled the best in old direct response copywriting ads.

Re: Top 25 Oddball Interview Questions Of 2010

#13
post #10

The majority of the questions that I looked at where applications of binary search.

I think I know why so many of these are simple binary search questions. If you actually read the full interview descriptions that most of these come from, you'll see that the vast majority of them were rejected. As an interviewer, the very first question I ask is "what is a binary search and what is its big-O run time?" Assuming the candidate has a CS background, this is meant to take up about 15 seconds of the interview and allow us to get to the real questions. I suspect many other interviewers do something similar. Most of these posters likely struggled with it and didn't get to the real questions, so that's all they could share.
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