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Comment by zeraholladay | Hacker News Reader

Asking relevant questions at an interview is a good idea, but I've noticed that a lot of technical interviewers ask questions it took them weeks to understand and fix when they use this approach. Understanding a problem is often more difficult than solving it ... knowing that the interviewer understands the problem and constraints is even more of a challenge.

I once had an interviewer give me the kobayashi maru without telling me. I thought the guy was a jerk. He could just have pulled a gun on me and demanded my wallet if he wanted to judge my personality. I declined the second round.

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Can you describe your kobayashi maru question? I'm curious.

Yeah, but it wasn't technical. The point of the question was to assess my entrepreneurial IQ, or so I was told after. Generally if an unemployed person's applying for a job, their entrepreneurial IQ is low at the moment and they need money. Nevertheless: I was to acquire a desk to work at, which needed to have certain dimensions for under a certain dollar figure. The internet is down, the local office supply company doesn't have it, etc, etc, until I'm starting to think the interviewer is nuts. OK, I'll sit on the floor. His point was that you need to generate options, which isn't bad advice. But it was a dumb interview question.

Very dumb question, indeed.

The point of the Kobayashi-Maru test isn't to test whether they're capable of passing impossible tests, it's to test their character facing death. If you're choosing fellows to go to war with, you want to choose ones that won't shit their pants or otherwise make your last moments alive together awkward.

That's great for Star Trek. I'll keep interviewing technical candidates on a technical basis.

Perhaps the interviewer wanted to see if you could think up something like http://glinden.blogspot.com/2006/01/early-amazon-door-desks.... - and in the process test your willingness to be in an environment with such jury-rigged solutions.

the kobayashi maru isn't the impossible question itself. The kobayashi maru here is the situation of the jerk asking you the stupid question.

Remember the "unwinnable" test in the recent Start Trek movie that kirk wins by cheating?

You can look up the Star Trek reference, but in an interviewing context, it refers to an question that is essentially impossible to answer and/or basically never occurs in real life and yet is somehow meant to judge a candidate's ability to "think outside the box" or under extreme pressure.

As well as, of course, to showcase the interviewer's vast wealth of experience and keen insight into the human condition that enables him/her to assess as much in 5 minutes from candidate's response to a completely contrived question.

Maybe the test was how you react on this.

It was, but if you can show me a person that deals well with failure then you've shown me a CEO or saint.

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