Lets have some fun, and come up with the worst job interview question you can think of.
We have all heard about the job interview questions which are simply bad. Questions which test no practical skill, like asking people to write a quick sort implementation on a whiteboard. Or simply weird questions, which you have no idea about what they could imply, like "Are you a dog person or cat person?".
So let me hear the worst interview questions you can come up with. Which are so bad, that they become funny. (Bonus points if this was an actual question.)
Oldest comments (87)
Somebody who's a stack would obviously always work on the latest thing which was given to them. And a queue person would always finish the things which came in first.
A skip list person organized all their work in layers, where each layer has a bunch of tasks linked together.
The bloom filter person could reliably answer that they are not working on something. But cannot be completely sure if they are working on something.
TIL I'm a bloom filter.
Interviewer: "Did you heard about this facebook thing?"
Me: "Sure"
Interviewer: "Can you than develop something like that?"
Me: "What?"
Interviewer: "What?"
Actually that's hilarious :,)
Me: Of course. Actually, I have developed many things like that.
Interviewer: Such as?
Me: Well,I've developed a program called Tic-Tac-Toe that's like that.
Interviewer: What does it do?
Me: It plays Tic-Tac-Toe.
Interviewer: That isn't like Facebook.
Me: Oh? I'm sorry, perhaps I didn't fully understand your requirements. Can you elaborate?
[classic] Replace two values without an auxiliar variable.
I don't see anything wrong in my perspective. This must be a technical question that tests our knowledge on memory and variable usage, may be, beyond but I am fond of this question. It has definite answers though. I am just saying that this cant be a worst interview question after all (again, in my perspective)
I was asked once to compare myself with a famous person and explained why I think we are similar.
Did you compare yourself with Manuel Obre, the famous job applicant?
I actually compared myself with a football player (can't remember why), not proud of my answer but that was the first thing that came to my mind.
A parrot person.
Interviewer: When you are planning to get married?
Me (Surprised): Why do you ask this question?
Interviewer: Since people may take Some time off if they got married, soo?
Me (I was like what???): I am 21. I didn't plan for the next 5 years. And basically, I am a guy. there are no chances that I go for paternity leave. Moreover, it is a very personal question.
The above was the question asked to me by some HR in the last round of interview. I declined the company offer because of it.
Uh wtf
I bet that company doesn't hire women at all, as they might get married and might get pregnant.
The question is so terrible it overshoots being funny and lands to being just plain horrible.
I have a feeling this company also likes to ask women if they're planning on having children anytime soon. NOT ok.
I do not think that this happened in USA because it is illegal to ask any sort of questions like. Do you have wife? Do you have children etc..
Yeah sure later when you are hired, you got to put Married, 15 kids and 3 cats for your insurance and taxes but at interview? Nope.
"If you were a car what kind of car would you be?"
This was a real question asked in a job interview (just not to me).
One that changes colors when washed under stream of water :D
nice answer!
"What's your favorite Star Trek series?"
It's really bad to expect your employees to fit into some kind of arbitrarily-defined "nerd" culture.
The obvious correct answer here would be "the original trilogy".
"The one with the daleks"
As a fan of Star Wars, I must say...
Same problem with sports. It may not come up as much in tech, but as someone working at not-a-tech-firm, people love to talk about sports. And I just don't find any appeal in it. There's no room for me in those conversations.
Also, DS9, obviously.
Quick way to confuse the interviewer: 'I'd say the one with ... stars in it. Yeah, that one. Go sportsball.'
You probably wouldn't get hired there, but would you really want to?
The one the boldly goes where no one has gone before.
Interviewer: "Explain to me how does Helicopter functions?"
This was actually asked to me at the last round by the Technical lead of the company.
P.S. I am a software developer I have nothing to do with aviation.
Actually that is a great question for testing analytical thinking, logic and to see tought process...
Question is not there to actually explain techical details of a machine, it is more just a reason to discous, understand, analyse and explain however more suitable question would be "explain implementation of feature x" :)
I do agree with you it's just that, the question caught me by surprise as I was not expecting it at that point.
By the by, "...caught me by surprise as I was not expecting it..." is half the point of most interview questions. We're trying to get you off script. We want to interview the actual candidate, not the Amazing Candidate Persona™ most interviewees rehearse. After all, it's not like we'll be hiring that persona; we're hiring you.
Interviewer (CTO): "I don't know anything about frontend. But look at this regex on this piece of paper and tell me what it does"
Me: "This is impractical, but It looks like an email validation"
Interviewer: "Tell me what is wrong with it"
Me: "I mean I would use a computer for this"
What's wrong with it is that you can't validate an email address using a regular expression - the syntax is too complex. But as an answer (or, indeed, a question) that's extraordinarily niche...
I would say it's fairly simple to validate-- just not with regex.
With regex; I'd just test
([^]+)@([^]{1,255}). Or with JS:/(.+)@(.{1,255})/su.Read my reply again 😀
😂
"If our company starts with a Z does that mean it will be at the bottom of googles search list?"
I once was asked to do a curve discussion (complex geometric/algebraic set of multiple calculations) while applying for an ops trainee position. 🤷♂️
Pretty much stock questions like sorting an array.
I once was asked to ball park how much money does the world as a collective spend on SMS messages. I guess they were trying to see the reasoning behind an answer and what kind of questions would I ask.
The same company, different interviewer, then asked me to iterate over a matrix in a spiral. Kinda' weird.
Iterating over a matrix in spiral is actually a brilliant question! I'm going to steal it! 😃
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