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What's an interesting question you've been asked at an interview?

Avalander on October 12, 2019

Not necessarily a difficult question, but what is something you've been asked that was uncommon, weird, interesting, puzzling or flabbergasting?

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Saurabh Daware 🌻

I recently had an interview where we discussed about building a snake game. So they were putting conditions like what if I dont want snake to go out of boundaries, what if apple appears inside a snake. I personally loved that interview.

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Daniel Worsnup

It's interesting to me that they brought up those issues. If I were conducting that interview I'd almost certainly want the candidate to bring them up.

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Saurabh Daware 🌻

oh they gave these two issues as an example and then asked me to bring issues so yeah it was fun too! I then discussed about the winning condition and handling the snake size after eating each apple :D

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Daniel Worsnup

Nice! It sounds like a fun interview!

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ajv

I was asked what was my latest "Today I Learned" experience. I really liked it and I've been asking that from people that I click with during an interview

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Peter Street

I had an interview where, as part of the discussion of my history, I was asked what approach I would take if I was to restart my failed web-design company again, at the same time, with the same approach. It failed partially because of the climate (Set up a few months before Sept 11th and the dot-com collapse), and it was quite interesting to look at what I would and could have rationally done with my knowledge now, assuming no knowledge of Sept 11th coming. I rather think I could have succeeded...

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@lukeocodes πŸ•ΉπŸ‘¨β€πŸ’» • Edited

What's your favourite pie?

They admitted this was literally a sift question.

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Zohar Peled

My answer to that would be: 3.14

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Avalander

Haha, that's a fun one! At a previous team we used to ask candidates if they liked cats. The answer never had any weight in the hiring decision, but we were all pretty crazy about cats.

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Victor Warno

I wonder if the candidates would go mad for everything you ask - Probably assuming they don't get the job if they don't say they like it.

Do you like dogs?
Do you like bugs?
Do you like Brussel sprouts?
Do you like the little fruits they put on your cocktails and pierce it with a toothpick?

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Avalander

That's a good question. In our case, we then explained that all our test data was about cats, and had cat pictures and gifs in our internal tools and flooded the team chat with cat memes and said that it was okay if they didn't like cats quite that much, but they'd have to deal with us.

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SIMON DODSON

favorite excel formula?

what dont you like about this company?

what does hard work look like?

define risk?

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Yoann

What do you do if you have a 5000+ lines stored procedure that you have to debug ?

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Avalander

Lol, that would beg the question do you have 5000+ lines stored procedures?

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Yoann

And the answer would probably be something like "yes we have legacy SQL code that we should refactor one day". ^

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Nimmo

I was once asked "why do you want to work here" as the first question in an interview. I found that to be pretty unusual, since I generally go to interviews to find out if I want to work somewhere!

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Daniel

Q: What would you do if [you're using TypeScript and] there's no type definitions for the library you want to use?.

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Evie

Weirdest one I've had to date:

"Ok let's test your problem solving ability. How many golf balls are there in the United Kingdom?"

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Avalander

That's an odd one, how did you answer?

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Avalander

O.o That's an odd one. Was there anything in the context that warranted it?

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Agha Azeem

HR asked me: β€œwhen will you get married” πŸ˜‘πŸ˜‘