Avalander

Posted on Oct 12, 2019

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

#discuss

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

Top comments (22)

Saurabh Daware 🌻 • Oct 12 '19

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.

Daniel Worsnup • Oct 13 '19

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.

Saurabh Daware 🌻 • Oct 13 '19

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

Daniel Worsnup • Oct 13 '19

Nice! It sounds like a fun interview!

ajv • Oct 12 '19

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

Peter Street • Oct 16 '19

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...

@lukeocodes 🕹👨‍💻 • Oct 12 '19 • Edited

What's your favourite pie?

They admitted this was literally a sift question.

Zohar Peled • Oct 15 '19

My answer to that would be: 3.14

Avalander • Oct 12 '19

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.

Victor Warno • Oct 12 '19

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?

Avalander • Oct 13 '19

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.

SIMON DODSON • Oct 12 '19

favorite excel formula?

what dont you like about this company?

what does hard work look like?

define risk?

Yoann • Oct 13 '19

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

Avalander • Oct 14 '19

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

Yoann • Oct 14 '19

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

Nimmo • Oct 13 '19

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!