Interview: Good or Bad? Google, Amazon, Microsoft brain-teaser interview questions

This is a good question to understand a candidate's ability to problem solve.

Super vague and opiniated history of question

Just historically, Google and Microsoft have asked these questions since 2000. And see how much they have grown since then. The extremely vague and generic macro outlook to me rather indicative that something was right during that period of time. My guess why this was more effective in the beginning because the people who wrote the questions knew why they were asking the question.

Now there are too many people who do not understand the intentions of the question.

Not For Interviewers

The biggest problem to these questions is the interviewer. Majority if not all interviewers do not even understand the intention of the question. The main reason is that interviewers just ask a list of questions that need to be answered. The company gives them the list, and they ask it. So like many other questions, they think the right answer is the correct answer.

I've interviewed with many companies who have asked these questions, and none knew the intention of the questions. I know this because I knew the answers to all of them. There were a couple new ones but they were far easier than FAANG. When I answer them, the interviewer are easily impressed and moves on. In many cases, I would even give them other questions I knew of and they would be even more impressed.

Even if the interviewer has some clue to the question, they have no way to score a candidate like they can with technical questions. Also interviewers are not hired to have problem solving skills, so how well can they judge another person's problem solving skills? 

So basically, this is not an interviewer question. This is a hiring manager's interview question to ask and only if the hiring manager understands why they are asking this question.

Why the question?

The point of the question is to understand the candidates problem solving skills. In my opinion, this is one of the most important skills I look for. The main reason is that technology is always changing and I can train information, but I cannot train (or at least have no time to train) problem solving skills. I am looking for the candidate's ability to take the problem, break it down, ask questions, etc. 

The question is actually meant to be nearly impossible to solve for most candidates. That is probably why arbitrary questions became a thing too (like "how many tennis balls fits in a jumbo jet"). Because everyone became so obsessed with the actual answer than the reason why they asked it. And knowing the answer is quite useless for software engineer employees. If there's an answer, it is cheaper for the company just to buy the answer. What the company needs is an employee that can solve the problem that doesn't have an answer to it.

Bad Hires from Traditional Interviews

One example in my life on this difference was this one time that we hired a highly certified employee. He had many, many Microsoft/Cisco certificates. He had a lot of work experience. His projects were never completed. Near the end of his employment, the owner had me help him with a project and he couldn't tell the difference between a class and an object. I told the owner that he wasn't worth the time to train. We could hire a college grad that could do more.

Another example was a college "graduate" that was tasked to setup a computer with Windows. He was provided an install CD. He installed, then got stuck with a video driver. A bit odd for him to ask for help with this, but I answered his question. 6 hours later, my colleague calls me over and we find that he never installed the video driver because he didn't which video driver to install. The PC case was already open, and I just google the video card name and it was the first result that comes up. My colleague told me that he just told our boss to let him go. I learned that he had actually asked everyone how to install the video driver and still couldn't figure it out. We also found out later that he didn't actually graduate but dropped out of school.

Another example was a transfer from another department. He came with a lot of recommendations from his previous group. He was also very good at talking and making others feel good. Although he had the credentials, he was not able to do anything on his own. Every task had to be spelled out, even if it was a repeated task. Not only did it have to be explicitly written down, he had terrible attention to details. This was almost clear to me within the first 5 minutes of interacting with him for the first time.

My final example was a person that we actually hired before and basically fired for incompetence. I did my best to give her the benefit of the doubt. Even then, she was only able to accomplish two tasks of thousands of tasks. The two tasks being to copy a file to another server (which she actually copied to the wrong server... twice). I even had her screen share and watch her do it incorrectly, then corrected her (just to make sure she had access). At the end, I had her delete the file and have her do it again on her own. She was never able to do this for an entire week with a daily reminder. She was hired to be a procedure manager and she could not even copy files (she had plenty of tasks that was to set up meetings or talk to people but none of those were ever done).

My point with all this was that they all passed the interview. I did not interview any of them. To this day, I have no clue how they even lasted 5 minutes. I think firing people is harder than rejecting, and I wanted to fire all of them within minutes. I think the brain-teaser or open-ended questions are great to weed these people out.

Many candidates that I have recommended are either the longest tenured, promoted, or very well-liked.

Other Questions

These brain-teaser / open-ended questions should not be the only question to determine a candidate. This is just to understand the candidates ability to problem solve. 

One type of candidates that do well but are toxic to the company are the ones that are very smart but also have very big egos. So it is important to ask other questions that will determine their ability to work with others. In general, you do not want those candidates. If you do, then you need to make sure they and your existing staff have the right environments to handle such situations.

Another type are those that often cannot stop asking questions or only sees problems. The main problem with these candidates is that they analyze too long. A group could afford maybe one of these candidates if they are very good at identifying critical issues, but it is equally important to have someone that counter-balances to make sure things still move forward.

Reference

https://douglastclee.blogspot.com/2013/02/interview-oddball-and-riddle-questions.html

- Almost seems like I contradict myself here but not really. Will have to review that post in more detail.

Interview: Dear Interviewer, Would you Answer Your Own Questions Honestly?

Dear Interviewer, Would you Answer Your Own Questions Honestly?

If you are new to interviewing, these are good starting points (or see link below).

What I have thought interesting since I started interviewing is how "textbook" some of the answers are to the interview questions. All questions are structured to get some sort of information about the interviewee, but do interviewers ever think about what the interviewee thinks about the company on certain questions?

One of the questions, "Tell me about the worst boss you ever had," the interviewer is "trying" to see if you are going to talk smack about your older bosses. Almost everyone will recommend that you try to redirect the question to something positive, but why not say bad things about a bad boss (unless you've only had 1-2 bosses then I would also recommend you avoid answering this directly)?

Is the new boss expecting to be bad? If he is not bad, then why would he worry about what I say about bad bosses? Who has not had a bad boss? I mean this is like asking, "have you ever lied?" We all know the real answer, and we know that is not the answer the questioner wants to hear. Basically, you want us to lie. Is that how you want to start someone's career at your company?

If going the route of "yes, I do lie," I would also suggest that you add what you did about it. Like when my boss hired someone that was weak, I wrote a report trying to avoid any personal bias. I told her that this is my opinion and that I respect her choice because there are usually other factors that they have to consider that I am not privy to. Another example was a poor process. I recommended a better process with analytic on how it is a better business strategy. I want to show that I will go to my boss with my experience and my knowledge. I do not jump levels and report to his boss about my thoughts on him. If you cannot back up your actions, then maybe you should stick with the suggest response from CareerBuilder.

What if your boss was doing something illegal? I have not actually thought about this... and I am not sure exactly what I should do on that matter. I'd probably read the employee handbook and probably should be handled by HR. Anyways, this is probably a bit too personal to answer publicly because if you happen to be my boss... it is probably better that you don't know what I would choose. To all the not-worst bosses, what would you suggest?

Another question is "Where do you see yourself in five years?" Does anyone really know where they see themselves in five years that are relevant to work? Does the interviewer even know where they see themselves in five years with their current work? How can they expect that from someone who doesn't even know who is going to hire them?

I seem to dislike questions that really only have one correct answer. These types of questions only seem to serve one purpose and it is not to understand the interviewee. If you or your HR is not going to put effort into finding the right candidates, I have lower views of your company. Does that mean I will not choose you? Unfortunately for me, I probably would consider the option since most companies ask the same types of questions.

But like interviewers who are looking for that one ideal candidate, I am seeking for that one ideal employer and I hope to do so by being more straightforward about my profession abilities. If there was one recommendations for employers about their interview questions, that would be that you would be able to answer the same questions you ask: "tell me who was your worst manager that you've had," "where do you see me in five years?" If you do not like answering those questions, then do not ask those questions. Like interviewees, avoid lying because you will not get what you really want. It is a lose-lose for both parties.

On a different matter, these staple responses from recruiters and head-hunters are things that have always made me uncomfortable with them. Shouldn't they be people who should be making the hiring process easier by being more honest about the truths? Why has the whole interview process been mutated into something that favors people who know how to interview and not their real talent? Does a company really care if someone knew how to answer a certain question that is really irrelevant to them? Who cares if the person cannot see where they are in 5 years? Who cares if they had a bad boss or had all bad bosses? They only care that the employee adds value to the company.

I am not saying that the knowledge is important. It is important to know if we have ambition or have social issues. But you are expecting someone to know those with just one or two questions?

Sometimes I wonder about the use of recruiters. Their business model revolves around getting people hired. People don't get hired if the company already has perfect people. They love churn because that gets them the bonuses that they work out in the contracts.

I think there is a lot of room for improvements for HR, recruiters, and head-hunters to really make more long term solutions to the interviewing process. I think recruiters have the most to gain especially with the current technology in social networking. They can now keep in touch with people for several years without being very intrusive.

Why recruiters? Because companies do really not care much about employees or potential employees' life outside of their company. They want to focus on their product. Also on the political level, there are some managers that hire people they know over people people who are capable. It only takes one poor manager to make systems extremely inefficient.

And, people want to focus on their skills so that they can add value where they are talented at. Why should the person know who they work best with, especially when the employer does not even give them a say in the matter? People struggle to get themselves hired and you want them to know someone else?

This leaves the recruiters to find the best matches because that's their role in the process. They care that you did good work for Company A, showed loyalty in Company B, and demonstrated hard work at Company C. They should care that you had that one bad boss but you overcame it. They should have a better idea what your 5 year goal is better than the interviewee (isn't it kind of messed up that they call the company the client and not the other way or even both?) With their experience, they should know where you can be in 5 years and they should know what the company would expect in 5 years. They should know historically who you have worked best with. Not only that, that knowledge should be exactly the same except that you explain it in the perspective for that person. Too bad they only care about the person being at the right place and at the right time... if not, they move onto someone else.

Anyways, there's probably an infinite and one reasons to why the system is not that way. Unfortunately, I cannot help but think on these processes on a part-time basis as I would really wish to focus on processes on building new engineering technologies. I have been distracted by other industries because getting good coworkers is the biggest problem in process improvements. So here's my weakness... I am easily distracted by things that I consider the biggest problems on things that are preventing me from working on new engineering technologies.

Reference:
http://www.cnn.com/2009/LIVING/worklife/03/04/cb.answering.tough.interview.questions/