How would you answer this?

[DawnM]

What is the purpose of a question like this? I wouldn't even want to work for people who ask ridiculous questions......ask me something that has to do with the job you are hiring me for!

I have no patience for this type of thing.

Dawn

 

[Rumpus]

What is the purpose of a question like this? I wouldn't even want to work for people who ask ridiculous questions......ask me something that has to do with the job you are hiring me for!

I have no patience for this type of thing.

Dawn

Probably to see how quickly you could think on your feet.

 

[The Mystery Machine]

Lid on or off I would attempt to get my force and weight up the side of the blender to knock it over and escape.

If that does not work I would take clothes off and wave them to attract the attention of a passing person to help me out.

 

[TinkPinkPoem]

I'm guessing there's no "real" answer, you can tell a lot by how someone answers a question like this. What each candidate says probably shows their way of thinking/how they would act in certain situations.

 

[collegejunkie]

I'm guessing there's no "real" answer, you can tell a lot by how someone answers a question like this. What each candidate says probably shows their way of thinking/how they would act in certain situations.

dbf basically said what you said. he said it's just a matter of seeing if you can think on your feet, how creative you are, and if you have a playful side or if you're just 1000% serious all the time. i'll have to ask him what weird questions he got and post them!

 

[Rumpus]

“What would you do if you just inherited a pizzeria from your uncle?" From Volkswagen-Business analyst.

“There are three boxes, one contains only apples, one contains only oranges, and one contains both apples and oranges. The boxes have been incorrectly labeled such that no label identifies the actual contents of the box it labels. Opening just one box, and without looking in the box, you take out one piece of fruit. By looking at the fruit, how can you immediately label all of the boxes correctly?”
For Apple - Software QA Engineer position.

 

[LuvCuteBoys]

Goldman Sachs??????? I'd call the federal government and tell them to get me out of it.

 

[disneyquestions]

The question said I was "the size of a pencil" not that "I was a pencil". I guess you did not get the job.

Oh snap!!! Thats funny - guess I don't get the job....

 

[kathie859]

No interviewer ever asked me any bizarre question like that; however, an acquaintance of mine interviews candidates for a small, very specialized department for a major corporation. He would ask candidates "if you were a tree, what tree would you be?". He admitted that he did it just to mess with them....nice, huh?

I am afraid that I'd laugh or snicker if someone would ask such an off the wall question during an interview

 

[Rumpus]

No interviewer ever asked me any bizarre question like that; however, an acquaintance of mine interviews candidates for a small, very specialized department for a major corporation. He would ask candidates "if you were a tree, what tree would you be?". He admitted that he did it just to mess with them....nice, huh?

I am afraid that I'd laugh or snicker if someone would ask such an off the wall question during an interview

I would not be a disiduous tree; its too cold where I live. Maybe I would be a shrub, like a Mt. Laural or a rhondedenron. (sp). Nice leaves but they keep them all year long. If I had to, I would be a conifer.

 

[The Mystery Machine]

No interviewer ever asked me any bizarre question like that; however, an acquaintance of mine interviews candidates for a small, very specialized department for a major corporation. He would ask candidates "if you were a tree, what tree would you be?". He admitted that he did it just to mess with them....nice, huh?

I am afraid that I'd laugh or snicker if someone would ask such an off the wall question during an interview

Having horticulture as a hobby that is easy for me. I would be the Bristlecone Pine as it is the oldest living organism on earth at almost 5000 yrs.

 

[The Mystery Machine]

“What would you do if you just inherited a pizzeria from your uncle?" From Volkswagen-Business analyst.

“There are three boxes, one contains only apples, one contains only oranges, and one contains both apples and oranges. The boxes have been incorrectly labeled such that no label identifies the actual contents of the box it labels. Opening just one box, and without looking in the box, you take out one piece of fruit. By looking at the fruit, how can you immediately label all of the boxes correctly?”
For Apple - Software QA Engineer position.

1.) Have a pizza memorial and make some great pizza and then tally up the finances to see what's up and go from there.

2) Smell the boxes?

 

[BillSears]

For the blender one I'd just jump out. I'm not great at this but I'll try to explain it. If a human were shrunk down to the size of a pencil his muscle strength to weight ratio would have a huge increase. Just like the reverse for ants, if an ant were actually made into a giant ant it's weight would overwhelm it's strength and it wouldn't be able to move. It all has to do with the square-cube law:

When an object undergoes a proportional increase in size, its new volume is proportional to the cube of the multiplier and its new surface area is proportional to the square of the multiplier.

So by shrinking down that far you become proportionally stronger.


E.T.A. Here's an example I found:

You are right, the strong ant thing is simply wrong. The reason is related to the so-called Square-Cube Law. Basically, the amount of force a muscle can generate is proportional to the square of the size (the cross sectional area of the muscle) but the weight is proportional to the cube of the size (the volume). This means that every time you double the ant's size you would multiply its strength by 4 and its weight by 8. So it would get relatively weaker as it gets bigger.

That ant that lifts 5 times its body weight, if scaled up 350 times to be human sized, would not even be able to lift 2% of its weight, its own weight would suffocate it. That is largely the reason why even the largest insects are still rather small. On the other hand, the human that can lift about half of his body weight, when scaled down to the ant size, would be able to lift 175 times his own weight, not just 5 times.

So why don't we see mammals that are the size of ants? Wouldn't they have a competitive advantage being so much stronger. It turns out to be another square-cube law. The amount of heat generated by and the amount of water in an animal is proportional to the cube of the size of the animal while the rate of heat loss and water loss is proportional to the square of the size. So our ant-sized human would die of dehydration in about 12 min (instead of about 3 days) and would easily die of hypothermia.

 

[golfgal]

I would assume that they aren't really looking for an "answer" vs how would you work through the problem. I would start asking a lot of questions about what else is going on around the blender--is there anything else in the blender, are their other normal sized people around, is the blender container in the stand or is it just sitting on the cupboard, etc. Then using additional information, formulating a solution.

 

[Rumpus]

For the blender one I'd just jump out. .

YOU'RE HIRED! When can you start?

 

[Rumpus]

Having horticulture as a hobby that is easy for me. I would be the Bristlecone Pine as it is the oldest living organism on earth at almost 5000 yrs.

I'll be that! I have to admit that some of my rhodies and mt. laurels and looking a little ratty.

 

[agnes!]

I'll work with the other miniaturized people who also ended up in the blender and figure out a way all of us could get out?... And then we would.

After that work with the genius (probably being shrunk was just an accident! Is his name by any chance "Wayne Szalinski"?) And if the genius is evil, we'd get the incident reported to Homeland Security to protect our fellow citizens) who came up with the miniaturization process to get the darn thing patented and marketed so we would all become wildly successful. I can see it now, something like "Atomic US" or "Mini Me's!" or "Little WOWs"...the IPO would be incredible.

agnes!

 

[PrincessKsMom]

And this is an example of why Goldman finds itself in the situations it does.