Post:
You have three switches in one room and a single light bulb in another room. You are allowed to visit the room with the light bulb only once. How do you figure out which switch controls the bulb? Write your answer in the comments before looking at other answers.
Comment:
If this were an interview question, the correct response would be "Do you have any relevant questions for me? Because have a long list of things that more deserving of my precious time than to think about this!
It’s funny to read the reactions and the people not understanding that programming questions are not enough to judge you. We need people with functioning brains and that usually means problem solving skills. And sometimes the problems are fucking idiotic! Nobody cares about the light switches. We want to see how you think. We want people who don’t give up if they can’t look it up.
You think you’re hot shit because you learnt the latest trendy language? I’ve wasted entire days with people like that because they couldn’t be fucking arsed reading error messages and figuring things out by themselves.
I’ve had a couple interview tasks that are like “clone this repo and run it. Try to do [action]. Tell us any errors you find and how to fix them”
One of them was some sort of redux app, and the problem was a state mutation. Another one, the CSS had some weird so stuff rendered crazy. Both were pretty easy to track down and fix. You could probably also do something that’s like an error thrown, but people would probably just feed that into an AI now.
Everyone has those days. People are not a static value.
Which is why companies here don’t do stupid tests but look if you fulfill some absolute minimum requirements and then look how you do with the team and the job for a week.
Stupid interview questions show you nothing about how people think. Might as well ask them their astrological animal and blood type
Telling me your blood type or astrological signs is as useful as telling me your certifications and years of experience, these days.
On the contrary, someone can learn a lot from a question like this. If they immediately spit out the answer, then I know that they studied and came prepared to answer common questions like that. If they give a response like the OP, then I know they are an asshole to work with. If they don’t know, do they ask follow up questions or ask for a moment to think can tell me how well they like to work in a group. If they talk about asking a coworker vs researching a solution independently first can tell me how they may react to a brick wall of a problem. Last thing that comes to my mind, is how long they try before giving up. That can be a good indicator for how they treat work meetings - do they push through the task one at a time and in exact order, or do they have the social skills to know when it is time to shut up and move on to the next thing.
The problem is that it sounds like a riddle. In a riddle, you’re traditionally supposed to work within the rules that you’ve been told. So, not thinking outside the box here is not an indication that the person isn’t capable of doing so.
Of course, if I encountered this problem in real life, I’d ask Carol from accounting to check the other room, while I flip the switches. But my instinctive answer was that it is not possible, because I assumed it to be a riddle and the provided rules did not allow a solution.
That’s a much better question, though! “Here’s a stack trace and the source code. Walk me through where to go from here.”
Most places use at least some open source software, so most places can do this, and if you ask your sys admin team nicely, there’s probably some stack traces available, hot off the prod.
Sure, but I’ve a guy working with me who’s supposed to have ten years xp in the tech we use, and he’s pretty fucking useless.
Meanwhile the young front-end dev who didn’t know any of our tech turns out to learn everything we throw at her after one explanation. Pure tech eval would’ve meant throwing her away after reading her cv.