This article was taken from the May issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content bysubscribing online
We've all been there. You're sitting in front of the panel -- that last hurdle to landing your dream job. You've spent time preparing for the questions: what your strengths and weaknesses are, why you want to work there... But then there's that one question that comes out of nowhere -- the oddball question. Prepare yourself with our top-ten list of quirky questions posted by job applicants at glassdoor.com. "How many tennis balls are in this room and why?" Asked at Yahoo "You are in a room with three switches, which correspond to three bulbs in another room, and you don't know which switch corresponds to which bulb. You can only enter the room with the bulbs once. You cannot use any external equipment (power supplies, resistors, etc). How do you find out which bulb corresponds to which switch?" Asked at Goldman Sachs "Are your parents disappointed with your career aspirations?" Asked at Fisher Investments "If I put you in a sealed room with a phone that had no dial tone, how would you fix it?" Asked at Apple "If you were a brick in a wall, which brick would you be and why?" Asked at Nestlé USA "How would you move Mount Fuji?" Asked at Microsoft "Develop an algorithm for finding the shortest distance between two words in a document. After the phone interview is over, take a few hours to develop a working example in C++ and send it to the manager." Asked at Google "Given a dictionary of words, how do you calculate the anagrams for a new word?" Asked at Amazon "How many hair salons are there in Japan?" Asked at Boston Consulting "Say you are dead -- what do you think your eulogy would say about you?" Asked at Nationwide Insurance
All the questions have been self-reported by job-seekers at glassdoor.com
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
