Applying for a job ... sincerely (Not serious)

[loinburger]

This happened during a whiteboard programming exercise in an interview with Amazon (I read an article literally the day after this interview about how Amazon is a terrible employer)

Interviewer: Write a lock-free algorithm to solve the dining philosopher's problem [or some sort of non-trivial concurrent programming problem, this was a couple years ago so I forget the specifics]

loinburger: Sure [writes algorithm on whiteboard]

Interviewer: You forgot to put a semicolon at the end of line 16

loinburger: Okay

Interviewer: Aren't you going to fix it?

loinburger: You were being serious? I thought you were joking

Interviewer: No, I was being serious

loinburger: Oh, okay

Interviewer: ... so aren't you going to fix it?

loinburger: No

[Egbert]

My greatest weakness is a lack of patience when dealing with idiotic questions.

That is close enough to the answer I once gave to that question.

I was a teenager at the time. Doofus interviewer was asking stupid HR questions. He then asked "what is your greatest weakness". I replied "answering all these stupid questions".

That interview was memorable for the interviewers response to my sincerity.

I learnt that HR types do not really value sincere answers.

PS WE then had an argument about whether his questions were stupid and pointless.

[self biased]

[Salina Tillie]

What about being asked, "What is your greatest achievement?". When in fact you have just been fired from your previous job.

[rah]

Classic.

When I first started interviewing I actually asked those questions since that's what the book said to do.

Dumb ****ing book.

[notyoueither]

I always ask the 5 year question to get a sense of how seriously the prol is treating the prospect of working for me.

I don't give a **** what he or she says. I want to read the person. I sign the cheques so I'm interested.

[DaShi]

For me it's how they talk about their last or current job. How they describe their past work experience can be very telling, especially when comparing it to what they wrote in their resume. You'd be surprised how quickly "does not work well with others" comes out.

[loinburger]

All of the interviews I've helped conduct were purely technical (the candidate had already passed the "what is your greatest weakness etc" part), so all I do is ask questions to see how much they've embellished their resume (e.g. one guy had a resume that said that he had years of experience with computer security, so I asked him "should you use AES or DES or encryption, and why" and "should encryption precede compression or vice versa or does it not matter, and why" - turns out his experience with computer security consisted of installing Norton)

[Egbert]

- turns out his experience with computer security consisted of installing Norton)

Awesome!

One day at work, many years ago, I was interviewing for a job that needed somebody with experience using various bits of software. I wasn't too comfortable with the assurances this woman knew her stuff and kept asking and gave her a little test. It turned "she knew about computers because her brother had one in his home".

She hadn't actually used them but she knew about them.

* the test was I asked her to save a word file. I even told her to push the little "save" icon. She couldn't save that file.