Want to
work at Google or Facebook? Answer these weird interview questions
Tech companies are known for asking
weird, confusing and, frankly mean questions of job applicants.
Tech giants such as Google, Facebook and Apple are renowned for their
interview questions. But now smaller tech companies, hoping to be the
next startup-turned-tech giant, have started to follow suit.
Here's a selection of some of the weird
and wonderful questions tech companies asked unsuspecting, nervous interview
hopefuls. Answer them correctly and you might just land yourself a job at a
world-beating tech company.
1.
On your very best day at work - the day you come home and think you have the
best job in the world - what did you do that day?
2. You are shrunk to the height of a 2p coin and thrown into a blender.
Your mass is reduced so that your density is the same as usual. The blades start
moving in 60 seconds. What do you do?
Asked by Google, the answer to this conundrum is jump.
Because your density remains the same, your muscles will have the same
power as a normal-sized human. This means that you will still be able to jump
high enough to clear the blades, even though you're the size of a 2p coin.
That's a brain-teaser and a half.
3. A man pushed his car to a hotel and lost his fortune. What happened?
Another one from Google, this one has a much simpler answer: He was
playing Monopoly.
4. If I was talking to your best friend, what is one thing they would say
you need to work on?
A slightly more straightforward question from
Apple, this one asks for a
personal response. It's always best to err on the side of caution with these
questions - you probably shouldn't, for example, say, "They think I'm
lazy and prone to lying".
5. If you had a choice between two superpowers - being invisible or flying
- which would you choose?
Microsoft asked this
question in an interview for a high level product lead position. It's unlikely
that it is intended as a trick question, given that a
successful interviewee answered, "That's easy I would choose
being invisible since then I could fly." A skeptical person on
Glass
Door said, "Invisible = you have a fear of something or you are shy.
Flying = you don't have a fear of being on stage (good leaders)."
6. If you woke up and had 2,000 unread emails and could only answer 300 of
them how would you choose which ones to answer?
In asking this question, recruiters at Dropbox were looking for answers
that involved interviewees filtering for emails sent to
by their boss.
7. What would you do if you were the one survivor in a plane crash?
Airbnb asks this question of people applying to be trust and safety
investigators. The most popular answer on
Glass
Door is "Be glad that I was flying solo that day". One of the
least popular was "I would turn on my cellphone and call you to say that
I'll be late for work".
8. What's your favourite 90s jam?
This question from Squarespace judges applicants based on how
millennial they are.
9. Jeff Bezos walks into your office and says you can have a
million dollars to launch your best entrepreneurial idea.
What is it?
Amazon likes to think big,
so this question is probably testing candidates about their ability to come up
with creative ideas. That said, a funny answer on given
Glass Door could trick them into giving you the job: "I cannot tell
you right now, I am in an interview, and once I get hired we can talk about
it".
10. You’re in a row boat, which is in a large tank filled with water. You
have an anchor on board, which you throw overboard (the chain is long enough so
the anchor rests completely on the bottom of the tank). Does the water level in
the tank rise or fall?
The answer to this common sense question from
Tesla in an interview for
a mechanical engineer position is "the water levels fall".
The anchor is more than water, so its displacement as mass, when it is on
the boat, is greater than its displacement as volume, when it’s in the
water. So if you throw it overboard the water level will fall.