Posted on 08/05/2011 10:53:16 AM PDT by Slings and Arrows
Nobody has to tell you that it’s a rough job market. So when you do finagle a job interview, you’ll want to shine.
-snip-
Procter & Gamble: Sell me an invisible pen.
Facebook: Twenty five racehorses, no stopwatch, five tracks. Figure out the top three fastest horses in the fewest number of races.
Citigroup: What is your strategy at table tennis?
Google: You are climbing a staircase. Each time you can either take one step or two. The staircase has n steps. In how many distinct ways can you climb the staircase?
Capital One: How do you evaluate Subway’s five-foot long sub policy?
Gryphon Scientific: How many cocktail umbrellas are there in a given time in the United States?
Enterprise Rent-A-Car: Would you be okay hearing “no” from seven out of 10 customers.
Goldman Sachs: Suppose you had eight identical balls. One of them is slightly heavier and you are given a balance scale. What’s the fewest number of times you have to use the scale to find the heavier ball?
Towers Watson: Estimate how many planes are there in the sky.
Lubin Lawrence: If you could describe Hershey, Godiva and Dove chocolate as people, how would you describe them?
Pottery Barn: If I was a genie and could give you your dream job, what and where would it be?
Kiewit Corp.: What did you play with as a child?
VWR International: How would you market a telescope in 1750 when no one knows about orbits, moons etc.
Diageo North America: If you walk into a liquor store to count the unsold bottles, but the clerk is screaming at you to leave, what do you do?
Brown & Brown Insurance: How would you rate your life on a scale of 1 to 10?
(Excerpt) Read more at moneywatch.bnet.com ...
Following up ...
The balls aren’t identical. That’s reality.
Scales can only measure within certain and highly proscribed limits, and only to a certain precision. That’s reality.
People are people and full of all sorts of ways accessing their motives, and thus influencing people-driven outcomes.
THAT’S REALITY.
Goldman Sachs was and still is big into derivatives. Toxic and dangerous derivatives. They hire a myriad of mathematical idiot savants to show how to pull the eighth ball out of seven “identical” balls. Each and every one of them thinks he and she is a bloody genius. Including the ones who know better and the salesmen and marketeers.
They were wrong, they are wrong, but only GOOD social engineers know why, and can help them. And help us, the US. The US of A. The whole world. Save from financial armageddon.
But as you suggest, they ain’t hiring same.
Why is one an idiot savant for being able to see how to proceed with the question? Or in other words, what fault do you find with my solution that yeilded taking two weights on the scale to solve the problem?
That’s a variant of the Lieutenant’s ordering a Sargent to raise the flagpole solution. In my one mechanical engineering course the Professor praised that kind of engineering solution. Give the problem to someone known for how solve such problems.
The answer desired was the least number of weightings needed. And that is ZERO. Sorry, your answer may be pedagogically interesting as some abstracted example of non-real world engineering, but in the real world someone would figure out how to answer correctly with NO weighting.
Exactly. If Kirk can command a starship, he knows how to delegate.
I wouldn’t use the scale at all. I could tell by hold two at a time in each hand. Don’t need no stinkin scale..
That didn’t sound right. You guys know what I mean..
It took more time to formulate the questions, and the clever geeks who made them up knew the answers from the getgo, that is to say they aren’t so clever after all, than the time that is given the candidates to solve them.
Anyone can come up with the Jeopardy answers (which require questions from the contestants) just as anyone can come up with clever clues to a crossword puzzle.
Don't over think the question; the answer is 2250 divided by 225 = 10. The answer is all 1s and 0s.
Seems to me you turn one on and leave on for a long time. Then turn that one off. Turn one of the others on and go upstairs. The cold bulb is from the switch you never messed with.
I wouldn’t have done well om the Kirk question, I would’ve just punched the interviewer in the nose.
I would ask for clarification and if the interviewer meant to say the Subway 5-dollar foot-long promotion. I think this is a question is used to determine if you are actually paying attention.
Almost all the questions (excepting SIG’s and one other) I’ve seen are “proof of lemminghood” types.
I’d ask CapOne a bunch of nasty questions designed to make the interviewer squirm if he had a soul.
The question isn’t designed to literally come up with a real world application to find the heaviest ball. It’s a down and dirty test to see if the candidate understands the information potential of the scale. The vast majority of applicants will see the scale as a binary device and proceed accordingly. Those who can correctly ascertain that the scale can provide three and not two possible results are a leg up on those who cannot.
Now the question I found interesting was the one involving the 25 race horses. Unless I’m missing something, there isn’t enough data to figure it out. I would need to know how many horses race at once. The simplist solution would be to race all 25 horses at once and get the top three, but I doubt that 25 horses can race at once. Which leaves me stuck until I can learn how many can be on a track at a given time.
Re-write the algorythm of course.
False. The correct path will use two weights to arrive at the correct answer every time.
IMHO, you completelly missed what they're looking for. They're looking for the candidate who understands how to maximize the information from the scale to arrive at the correct answer 100% of the time.
The majority of applicants will see the scale as a device capable of giving binary information as you have done when you concluded that three attempts will put you on the safe path and yeild the correct answer 100% of the time.
However, the scale is capable of giving a trinary answer shortening the safe path that yeilds a correct answer 100% of the time from three attempts to two. That's what they're looking for.
The question isn’t designed to literally come up with a real world application to find the heaviest ball. It’s a down and dirty test to see if the candidate understands the information potential of the scale.... is an assumption. A presumptive assumption. Even if you were the very person who wrote the test and how to score it, it would still be so.
When Goldman Sachs invented many of its derivative instruments they also ignored or were utterly ignorant of the presumptive assumptions that reality has now demonstrated and will continue to demonstrate that underlie their houses of cards.
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