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When I was in the Marines, every quarter my unit would meritoriously promote one Marine to NCO. A board of 4 or 5 NCO's in the unit was formed and candidates where brought in and asked a series of questions. The board then voted and one person was promoted.
One guy would always ask something totally stupid like "How many holes are there in a C-Ration cracker?" (IIRC there are 54).
The NCO's in the board had 3 or 4 questions they could each ask to evaluate the candidate. I finally asked him "Why don't you ask some relevant questions like 'Why do you want to be a corporal?', or 'How would you handle a situation like ...?'" He said "I like to see them sweat!"
That manhole cover question is no different. It told the interviewer no real info about the person, and only made the poor guy sweat, and probably made him think "Wow, now I feel stupid". The interviewee is already under pressure and nervous.
Want to see how someone thinks? Give them a problem and a white board.
If it's not broken, fix it until it is
modified 27-Mar-15 9:54am.
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More probably than not it doesn't show how you think but that you have heard this question before. And honestly who hasn't?
The good thing about pessimism is, that you are always either right or pleasently surprised.
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OriginalGriff wrote: No - it shows how you think.
The interviewer got the question from the internet and that they themselves didn't know that answer either until they read it on the internet. And if an interviewee knows the answer then it is much more likely that the interviewee got the answer from the same place rather than figuring it out. If the interviewer thinks otherwise then that only demonstrates that the interviewer isn't very smart.
Wouldn't demonstrate much about the interviewee at all except that they were researching interview questions rather than new technologies.
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Oh the engineer in me is cringing. 
Mongo: Mongo only pawn... in game of life.
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Not a stupid interview question, but somewhat unusual interviewer behaviour:
During an interview I faced way back in 1995, the panel had three interviewers. They gave me a sheet of paper, and gave me a puzzle to solve. Immediately, all the three interviewers started peering deeply on every stroke/character/number that I wrote on that paper. It was very difficult to solve this with three pairs of eyes watching each mistake/misstep I took.
Did not get selected.
Learnt how not to conduct an interview.
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I had the same question once!
It's to test your ability to think outside of the box, I guess.
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Kevin Marois wrote: I was once asked why manhole covers are round.
I give an outside of the box answer:
"Because manhole covers are heavy, and to move it, it is much easier to roll a round manhole cover than a square one."
I've also been asked, "if you were a tree, what kind of tree would you be?"
Normally I answer:
"Red-Black Tree"
But if I were going for a compiler writer position I would answer:
"Abstract-Syntax Tree"
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I have no desire to work for a company who's interview process is about trying to trick me or make me sweat.
If it's not broken, fix it until it is
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Kevin Marois wrote: make me sweat
If you're a true engineer, sweating should be uncontrollable and come naturally 
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Manhole covers are round because a^2 + b^2 = c^2. Really.
The language is JavaScript. that of Mordor, which I will not utter here
This is Javascript. If you put big wheels and a racing stripe on a golf cart, it's still a f***ing golf cart.
"I don't know, extraterrestrial?"
"You mean like from space?"
"No, from Canada."
If software development were a circus, we would all be the clowns.
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I was asked something like "How many people are there flying in planes right now?"
I answered "325,761"
The interviewer was stumped!
PooperPig - Coming Soon
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Cool. Looks addictive. Must stay away.
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Yeah, get some work done. For once. 
I mean, with a name like Slacker007...
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Downloaded by five million people who would no doubt look at the Sega Master System or Nintendo NES and sneer, no doubt.
With the exception of Physics games (where the processing power wasn't available), there isn't a game that's played, nowadays, that isn't a variant of games from 8-bit systems; and some of them even look like they come from an 8-bit system (QED) (Yes, I noticed that the physics is slightly better).
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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is just one opportunity![^].
Cheers! 
"I had the right to remain silent, but I didn't have the ability!"
Ron White, Comedian
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Couple of days ago we had a candidate over for a "Junior Developer" role and a couple of my colleagues interviewed him. After an hour and a half they got back and proclaimed that the guy was no good because he couldn't solve a string reversal problem. Now, that's not the only thing that caused his "demise" obviously it was more of other things like not being passionate about software development in general, not having done a job long enough, not having any side projects to speak and appearing to not even try to solve the problem given during the interview.
What I find funny is these interviewer colleagues of mine really didn't do any preparation or due diligence to interview the candidate, 10 minutes before the interview they were scrambling on websites trawling for questions they can ask. Now that in my opinion is the failure of the interviewer just as much as that of the candidate to prepare properly. I have been to better interviews than this, where the interview lasts for around as much and longer if needed and they assess a lot of soft skills like communication, attitude etc and then some technical grilling on a whiteboard. The process is more two way than this case, the focus is not on solving a problem that you would never actually need to solve from scratch in real life anyway. Why do you think Google was invented? (not talking about "copy-n-pastable" solutions, just general searching for ideas etc.)
What is your opinion on this? Do you think asking "beaten to death" programming questions in an interview is just a lazy interviewing attitude because the interviewer couldn't be bothered to prepare properly? Is asking such questions even a point here?
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It's not about "has it been done before" or even "can he use Google" - it's a way of finding out how he thinks. Does he approach the task in a structured manner? Does he think first, ask sensible questions, or dive straight into code?
Can he even do a simple task without the internet and VS to help him?
Yes - it's an interviewer fail. Yes it's an interviewee fail as well.
Interviews are hard work for the interviewer: like any presentation they take 5 or more times longer to prepare for than to deliver, and if you rush your prep you will not get what you want: a good candidate. A bad interview can put the potential employee off the company, just as much as it puts a company off the potential employee.
Remind your colleagues that interviewing is very expensive: it takes considerable time to weed out the CV's you are interested it, interview candidates, and if you get the wrong one you are both stuck with them for a while and have to repeat the whole process.
"Beaten to death" questions have a place - because any task to be completed within the timeframe of an interview has to be relatively simple or it wastes too much interviewer and interviewee time. But they should be thought out well in advance.
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
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I use programming questions, but I do have certain ones that I bring out time and time again. It's not a laziness thing if it's being done for the right reason. The first thing is, we work in a fairly specific domain so it's an opportunity for me to assess whether or not people can actually answer questions about things that matter to us. Secondly, I'm not bothered about the candidate whiteboarding a solution or typing it in, I want them to engage with me so that they get a chance to find out the types of things we need - the interview is as much about whether they want to work for us as it is the other way around. I'm also not bothered about someone having a confidence issue talking to me in the interview - what I want is for them to give me some part that we can open a dialogue about; the classic case for me is if they say they use TDD, I would be looking to see how this plays into their answers. We can discus issues such as testing asynchronous code, for instance.
TL;DR - they can be useful, but you shouldn't be looking for textbook answers. It's about a dialogue.
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If someone asked me to reverse a string, I'd rotate the paper/monitor.
If they ask me something about the technology they use, I'll think about taking them seriously.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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My only experience is as interviewee, and I've been interviewed only once - when I've been hired in my current company.
The first step was a written questionary with 30 questions to be done in 40 minutes - the questions spaced from generic Computer Science (i.e. calculating a xor between 2 decimal numbers, ginving the result in binary and checking if the given hexadecimal representation of the result was correct), Calculus, Electronics, Signal Theory, C/C++ programming and VB6 (the last 2 were the actual requirements of the job).
After that they called me back some day later for the real interview where we only spoke about my past / side projects, ambitions, inclinations and the company business - what and how they do for living. They were impressed by the sincerity in my curriculum, I checked VB6 as good knowledge and got all the related questions right, while I marked most of the skills as academical, meaning I studied them and passed exams but had not any real experience.
Geek code v 3.12
GCS d--- s-/++ a- C++++ U+++ P- L- E-- W++ N++ o+ K- w+++ O? M-- V? PS+ PE- Y+ PGP t++ 5? X R++ tv-- b+ DI+++ D++ G e++>+++ h--- r++>+++ y+++*
Weapons extension: ma- k++ F+2 X
I use 1TBS
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The thing to bear in mind with this "stock questions" approach is that the candidate's agent will ask the candidate what question they were asked and use that to prep the next candidate through the door.
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I.explore.code wrote: After an hour and a half
If you can't tell within 10 minutes whether a developer knows what they're talking about or not, you've got problems.
There are only 10 types of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
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I know one guy who specializes in 4 or 6 hour interviews.
One interviewee asked for a comfort break after three hours, then called reception from his car to tell them to elephant off.
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
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