Today I was asked in an interview, " how many golf balls

Interview math problem? Lol I heard some Jobs ask math problems. Did ask if there was any more information?

>>55827785
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_problem

you were supposed to work out an order-of-magnitude informed guess, using math

>>55827808
that's what I figured but I don't even know the dimensions of a golf ball out a school bus. How am i suppose to come up with an estimate without this information?

>>55827847
use your imagination to imagine how many golf balls fit in a seat
then how many seats on a bus
then how many more seats could be placed on the remaining empty space

>>55827808
That's the most autistic interview ever, unless you know the dimensions, what's the fucking point? Ask him how many dicks he can fit in his mouth on a guessed and unknown volume of cock meat.

>>55827785
A golf ball is maybe 1 1/2" diameter, so a 15" cube is already 1000. Weight aside, you could easilly carry that size of a box. Your 20k guess is way short.

>>55827785
>PhD at Harvard applying for job
>Interviewer asks dumb OP's question

Applicant leaves interview

>Dumb millennials. Why can't we find any good candidates?

Boomer logic.

400,000
rough est

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>>55827880
>Ask him how many dicks he can fit in his mouth on a guessed and unknown volume of cock meat.

>>55827785
I guess it's just a psychology test to valuate your attitude and problem solving abilities. I think you should have asked him more information, rather than jumping straight to a conclusion.

>>55827911
This.

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>>55827880
sorry jamal but it's the kind of thing asked in interviews for anything harder than flipping a burger

You should have countered with "That would depend on the size of the bus wouldn't it?"

>>55827785
Is it a retard bus or a regular one?

A bus full

>>55827911

I've done this once. This stupid fucking HR bitch who was sitting in literally asked me what kind of animal I would be. I straight up told them that I don't want to work there because of that question and walked out.

>>55828001
>I straight up told them that I don't want to work there because of that question and walked out.
If that actually happened, good ya m80. You're doing the Lord's work.

>>55828001
McDonalds will be better off without you cleaning their toilets. You sure showed' them.

>>55828016
boot-licking wage slave detected!

>>55828001
>what kind of animal I would be
a gnu

>>55827973
Sorry buddy-friend-pal-pajeet, I'm an EE and CE dual major, lightyears ahead of a CS monkey, and our shit isn't half and vague and autistic. OPs interview reminds me of a freshman philosophy major trying to punch above his weight by getting stoned as fuck and trying to be deep.

>>55827785
you were an entire OOM off

>>55827980
That's the sort of smartass answer that everyone hates, especially people who are looking to be impressed.

>>55827911
Bus is approximately 2.5 x 3 x 10m. Maybe 1/4 is filled with seats and shit so about 55m^3

A gold ball is about 4cm wide, so 4/3 * pi * 0.02^3 is around 0.08^3 = 0.0005 m^3 so 2000 per cubic meter, but a bit less because there will be space so let's say 1700.

55 * 1700 = around 100k balls.

I should think a PhD from Harvard could at least do a bit of basic maths? I know they probably think it's beneath them, but it's certainly not a hard problem.

>>55828058
If they don't want a smartass answer, then they shouldn't ask me stupid questions. If they're going to ask me retarded questions like that, I'm better off looking for work elsewhere; if they actually give me the job after I give a smartass reply, then maybe they're worth checking out.

>>55827785
a school bus can be of any size, it's an intentionally ambiguous question. they're interested in seeing your reasoning skills

>>55828058
Sounds like the perfect answer for a stupid ass question.
If they want to test someone's ability to apply arithmetic to spacial based queries then there are better ways to do it for God's sake.

Just keep a jar of jelly beans on the desk and ask how many are in there, it's fucking simple.

>>55827847
Just ask them for the dimensions. That's what they expect you to do...

>>55828061
You could have at least looked it up before giving such a laughable estimate.

>>55828061
The average person does not know the volume of a golf ball or the dimensions of a bus without looking it up.

>>55828079
>>55828085
what's it like having autism?

>>55827898
Not OP, but I came up with about 20K, given a bus dimension of 40' x 12' x 8', with the golf ball size of 1.68", and giving 30% of the volumetric space for seats and such.

But I'm not a math person, so I may be way off.

>>55828079
If you seriously think that being able to estimate an answer for anything off the cuff is stupid, you don't deserve the job.

>>55828097
Good question, you'd have to be autistic to answer the original question faggot.

>>55828101
Giving an estimate without any fucking information supplied is something only fucking salesmen do, and it's why everyone hates salesmen. Anyone who actually gives a shit, would go and get some numbers before pulling an estimate out of their ass.

>>55827808
This OP.

Assume golf ball to be 4 x 4 x 4 cm cube.
Assume bus to be 200 x 200 x 1000 cm cuboid.
Hopefully the overestimation of the volume of a golf ball will be cancelled out by some of the assumptions made about the bus.
40,000,000/64 = ~600,000 golf balls, which is about the answer you'll find on Google.

>>55828097
>You're autistic if you don't answer stupid questions seriously

... Actually asking about the size of the bus is taking it seriously because you're actually trying to get an understanding.

Hell, if I was a boss and I asked that question I'd WANT that answer, because then you know you've got a potential employee who actually gives a shit to use some level of critical thinking. Not just throwing an answer out and hoping for the best. "Hoping for the best" is a terrible business strategy.

>>55828126
We don't use centimeters here nigger.
You wouldn't get the job.

>>55828136
The unit of measure doesn't matter in the results you idiot.

>>55828101
It takes about 3 nanoseconds to look up the information in any actual situation, but I doubt the interviewer gave them that privilege.

>>55828091
>>55828096
That's why I literally took guesses instead of looking it up.

I know a school bus is at least twice as long as a car so 10m sounds good. It's about the same width so 2.5m. It's taller than a person by at least a couple of feet so 3m. I've seen a golf ball in real life so I can make a rough guess at 4cm across. From there it's just estimates.

And btw I think it's a pretty good estimate, school busses are pretty small, and a very big portion is used up. YMMV but that's the point of the game, to make an estimation

>>55828061
You fucked that up pretty bad with
4 * 0.02^3 = 0.08^3
but at least you have the idea

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How many interviewers can you fit into a school bus?

>>55828096
>>55828119
If you're too stupid to make a reasonable estimate from limited data then why are you applying to this sort of job? Having a good order of magnitude estimate is very useful. Anyone who has studied engineering/science knows this.

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>>55828142
Your fired

>>55827785
>manlet answer
20,000 balls meeeh
>I fuck chicks working on HR on a daily basis
as many as I can put inside with my 9 iron.

>>55827785
not technology

>>55828149
But the point is that you're supposed to give a good estimate, or else you fail the question. That's what makes it stupid for an interview, it's pointless.

Looking it up says ~600k.

>>55828171
He never even said what kind of job he was applying for.

>>55828061
you fucked up when you decided to calculate the ball's volume as a sphere instead of a cube

>>55828185
He was incorrect, but he was not wrong.
He was aiming for the right spot, with errors along the way. Which is far superior to aiming for the wrong spot.
This is a differentiation that would matter.

>>55828185
the point of the question is for them to asses your reasoning skills. they don't care about the specifics of the answer or your interpretation of a school bus' size. as long as your reasoning checks out and the math is correct you will pass

how you can you people be so autistic

>>55828200
You could say that for literally any answer.

>>55828013
>>55828016
It's not that hard to do when you already have a job that you like when going to the interview. If they can't offer a better environment then you walk. Idiotic HR questions is one of the things that makes me leave instantly whenever I'm in an interview where I don't need the job desperately.

>there are people on /g/ too autistic to answer already autistic Fermi's problem

>>55828208
What other reasoning could you use besides volumetric differences between the bus and a golf ball? Anyone that seriously answers this question would follow the same logic.

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Wow I didn't know they asked these sorts of questions in higher up positions.

How do you prepare for a question like that?

How do you even answer it if you didn't have knowledge of size and dimensions of a golfball and buss?

>>55827785
You ask questions about the bus you goof. They don't want someone that just randomly guesses but works to an answer

>>55828243
you ask them for the dimensions
if they don't' answer then you come up with something "reasonable" and work from there. jesus it's really not that difficult

>>55828243
I'd use variables, like X and Y and whatever.
Then fill in the resulting equation with guesses for the variables at the end to get a numerical result.
Or ask for dimensions, which they probably wouldn't provide, the fuckers.

>>55828221
The golfballs in a bus Fermi is not super autistic. I once got asked to calculate how many crossbeams are there on the railroads of the state where the job I was applying to. That was after they had flown me in from an another country and very well knew I didn't have any idea about the railway network of that state. When questioned they didn't give any numbers on to how much railroads there are in the state. Threw out an answer based on a pure guess and managed to hit the correct order of magnitude.

>>55828213
You're aiming wrong if you just give an answer without explanation or thought.
Like you are right now.

>>55828333
I haven't given an answer.

>>55828355
A response is an answer. Don't be pedantic, it's something else people hate.

All they wanted you to do is go
"Hmm well assuming a bus of volume x and a goalball of volume y that'd be like z thousand"
They wanted the calculation you would do, not that the numbers are right. Because if you wanted good numbers you'd look it up.

>>55828367
Now I don't know what you're talking about.

>>55828380
>You could say that for literally any answer.
I'm saying that this is a bad response.
What are you having trouble with?

>asked him why is he asking me this
how old are you? have you honestly never heard of these kinds of questions?
>he just said it's part of the interview
this was retarded of him, but given the stratospherically autistic question you gave him i'm not surprised he floundered. he should have said that the question is just an arbitrary brain teaser to tease out how you think about problems when you haven't had time to prepare.
>i told him probably at least 20,000. I feel like I failed it
if that's all you told him, you definitely failed it.

your standard brain teaser answer should take the following structure
>person poses the question
>"okay, i think [insert assumptions about the problem here]. do you think those assumptions are reasonable or am i way off base?"
(these assumptions should be premises like the amount of space a golf ball takes and the rough size of the bus. if you have no notion of golf and don't know the size of a golf ball, that shouldn't eliminate you from the interview, and this is where that pitfall gets fixed)
>"okay, so given those details and accounting for the chairs and all that other stuff in the bus - and i'm assuming we're not filling a bus full of passengers - i think that works out to N golf balls"

that's about it. the correct answer isn't the point. there's too much random esoteric shit going on to answer that question seriously. the whole point is to see how you chip away at a problem. people that don't explain their thought process tend to be perceived as unreliable because their reasoning is more of a black box. if your code and logic is described as "black box", then nobody can work with you.

>>55828243
Have you literally never seen a golf ball or a bus before?

>>55828243
see >>55828419
and also >>55828262

unless you're interviewing at a company that manufactures golf balls, nobody's going to expect you to know the rough size of one. the fact that you need to ask us these questions is probably an indication that you wouldn't do well in an interview, though.

most people are intelligent enough to work in a team on code. i know a lot of you autists want to believe that you're saving lives or something, but a lot of coding is implementing logic, and you can get someone caught up with that. the real dangers are
1) whether the person is capable of identifying when they need to ask for help, and
2) whether the person takes the right mental routes to get to an answer.

if your brain is so fucking addled that you take these insane, circuitous paths to solve problems, fail to communicate the logic or reasoning behind your code (either in comments or anywhere), and don't communicate well with your team, then you become a huge cost on the company hiring you

>>55828419
>this was retarded of him, but given the stratospherically autistic question you gave him i'm not surprised he floundered. he should have said that the question is just an arbitrary brain teaser to tease out how you think about problems when you haven't had time to prepare.
I disagree, from the interviewer's perspective, he probably gained more information about OP from the response he got than he would have if he'd babied him through it.

>>55828532
that's probably true. like if someone walked into an interview and just told me straight up that he was autistic and all of his past colleagues felt he was socially abrasive i would be like "okay thanks for dropping by"

and companies wonder why they can't find candidates for the job

it's like they don't want you to make money for them

fuck hr, fuck ats, and fuck modern credential bullshit

>>55827785
"Is it a short bus?"

Goddamn you fucking people want everything spoon fed to you. You thought you'd get your degree without much effort, waltz in and get a 90k a yr job plus benefits no problem.

>>55828753
"it's whichever bus you rode growing up"

>>55828635
t. bootcamp graduate

Interviewer probably figured that OP must have ridden the short bus to school.

>>55827847
you should have just said something like, assuming each golf ball occupies 2cm^3, and assuming the bus to have a volume of 10m^3, then it would hold 10m^3 divided by 2cm^3

>>55828028
this

>>55828001
this sounds like an austism test. You failed it. I would too.

>/g/ gets all upset and confused when people ask them to show their problem-solving process instead of their '2+2=4 i am mommy's clever boy' skills
unsurprising

just say 'dunno'

it was a test for your butthurt autism

That's just an indication that the company was some shitty hipster startup. You should have just walked out then and there. I did that multiple times while looking for an internship. Legitimate companies don't ask these types of stupid questions,

>>55827847
Estimate. This is not about the perfect answer but about the order of magnitude. You should not be off by a factor of 1/100 or 100.

>>55828096
The average person does not (claim to) have a PhD from Harvard.

This isn't about knowing the dimensions of a golf ball, or a bus. It's not even about being right.

This is about showing you can think reasonably to work out a problem.

Same thing with FizzBuzz: it's not there to show you can program, but that you can think programmatically.

>>55827785

In Poland, correct answer would be: "As much as my dear company president require!". At least according to the "guides" for students and such, about searching for job or writing CV. For some reasons, such guides outright suggest absurds like writing, in "Hobby" section, "my hobby is riding a bike, which teach me about values of frendship and teamwork, as well as responsibility of being part of the team".

For some reason, I feel like this is supposed to take opposite effect.

>>55827785
>all these triehards pretending they would have come up with a well calculated rational answer on the spot

It's easy to think you would from behind your keyboard, it's much harder when you're under stress of a job interview and getting a question you did not expect

>>55827785

None.

The doors are closed.

It's gotta be at least 10 golf balls, right?

My guess is 11 golf balls.

>>55827880
This is fucking hilarious

>>55827785
HR is cancer.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMqNbgZnNLo

>>55828897
Top zozzle

top kek what kind of shit place would ask you something like that?

>>55829958
Big Bill Balderschweiz's Haus of Golf und Bus Transport, duh.

>>55827911
>be given an interview question clearly made just to see how the candidate thinks and reasons about a problem, i.e. the thing he'll have to do in a job
>be unable to even try
>don't get the job
>blame the boomers
Millennial logic. Keep being a NEET ;)

>>55830027
>hurr durr how 2 divide volume by volume
>requiring thinking and reasoning
Not a NEET. I'm happy with my six figure job, and they didn't ask useless questions like this in the interview.

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>>55827785
>" how many golf balls can fit into a school bus?"
An american bus or a european one?

>>55830078

And what if HR guy dont know that?

As soon as I hear a question like this in an interview, the alarm bells go off and I want to end the interview immediately

>>55830097
He shouldnt ask a question he doesnt have an answer to :3

>>55830097
he gets thrown out of the window i guess

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Close-packing_of_equal_spheres

>>55830048
If you think asking questions that require the candidate to speak and reason you're just too dumb and probably won't go far in your career (assuming you're not a NEET after all).

>>55830256
I'm already further than you are.

The idea is not to get the mathematically correct answer but to test how you react when faced with new problems.
If you don't know the answer, the correct reaction is to calmly explain how you would go about solving the issue.

>>55830268
Sure you are ;)

>>55830272
Name one legitimate tech company that asks questions like these in an interview.

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This reminds me a job interview at (((Google))).
They asked how many coffee in a morning are served in an entire city and what's the angle between the minute hand and hour hand when it's 3:15

>>55830299
Google and Microsoft.

>>55830326
>falling for le epic BuzzFeed clickbait articles
No, they actually do not ask those questions.

>>55830333
>No, they actually do not ask those questions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_interview

Entire books have been written about them.

>>55830326
NPR recently ran a piece on Google interview practices and they have definitely changed.
Google replaced meme HR questions with hard science, statistics on what factors determine the success of an employee.

One I recall was that they ask the employee to rate his skills on a scale from 1-5.
Men who rate themselves 5/5 are usually much worse than 4/5 according to Google.

>>55830345
And those books are out of date, because they found out those problems are useless and don't use them anymore.

>>55827847
>>55827880
>>55828096
How the fuck do you not know the rough dimensions of a golf ball or a school bus? Have you never seen one?
This is the kind of question where anything with the correct amount of digits is close enough. Just state your assumptions and show the process of how you solve the problem.

>>55827785
A bus is probably something like 10 * 2.5 * 2 metres in volume, and a golf ball is probably 8 * 8 * 8 centimetres in volume (it's not a cube, but there would be space between the balls so a sphere isn't a perfect model either).

I'll pretend I didn't just fuck around figuring out I should use the same units of measure, and say we now have:

A bus is about 1000 * 250 * 200 (= 50000000) cm^3
A golf ball is about 8 * 8 * 8 (= 512) cm^3

Dividing the bus volume by the golf ball volume gives us 97,656.25, so we can say you could fit about 100,000 golf balls in a bus.

The interviewer probably just wanted you to rattle off something like that.

>>55830404
>cm
>metres
commie

>>55828243
>>55828635
>>55829643
>>55827785
When you have a job, you will often have to work with:
-stupid colleagues
-stupid customers
-stupid ideas that come from upstairs
-stupid situations that cannot be helped

The interviewer wants to see how you handle yourself in such situations. They do not give a damn whether your guess of "80,000 balls" is accurate. They want to know whether or not the person being interviewed can be relied on when facing weird situations, or if they are going to sperg out or throw a tantrum.

>>55830417
>commie
>95% of world population
When are you going to accept that you're the faggots doing it all backwards?

>>55828422
Seeing the objects, and memorizing their size, are two different things anon.
I've been playing ping-pong for a few years and if you asked me now what the dimensions of a ping-pong ball are, i'd probably shit out a measurement of 3 centimeters diameter and i'd probably still fuck up.

Let alone a bus where you never cared to estimate the number of seats, the height of the ceiling, and from there the potential volume we should be filling out.

I would kill to have math problems or general knowledge questions asked of me in Interviews rather than the nonsense like tell me about a time you used teamwork to solve a problem and shit like this

>>55830404
Where do you play golf? 8x8x8 cm is way too big. That's almost a .5L beer glass. You know how many golf balls you can fit into one of those? At least four.

>>55830432
No one cares about your opinion you attention whoring tripfaggot.
The fact of the matter is that any company that asks these questions are either full of egotistical faggots or wannabe hipsters trying to be the next Microsoft. There are much better ways of assessing problem solving skills, such as asking domain relevant questions. It's a good sign to stay the fuck away from the company, regardless of your ability to answer such questions.

I can see how someone could implement some reasoning to find golf balls in a school bus.

But I've heard of questions like "how many windows are there in Manhattan", and I can't think of where you'd start with that one, considering that there are multiple buildings all of various sizes, so you can't just say "the average height of a building in Manhattan is X cm", because it's so much harder to estimate than the size of a bus.

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>>55830417
Ignoring how you even use metric measurements in higher education in USA as well now,
you are the 3rd world of measurement systems.
Kill yourself primitive troglodyte.

>>55830473
>There are much better ways of assessing problem solving skills, such as asking domain relevant questions.
OP's example tests the ability to make good guesstimates, and whether the interviewee is quick on their feet.

>>55830027
>ask questions that reasonable people would just google
>clever

>>55830503
It tests the candidates ability to deal with inane bullshit. It's easier to just walk away and go to another company isn't pretending to be hip like Google and Microsoft, when even they, years ago, abandoned those questions because they were so fucking useless.

>>55828001
"I would be a crocodile. These creatures are dangerous. Imagine asking them stupid questions and they just bite your head off. You could get killed."

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>>55830417

>>55830317
About one per person in the city (plenty drink none, one is common, and a few have two or three), so about 100,000?
360 / 12 / 4 degrees, though at first I said "they'd be in the same place, so zero"

>>55830537
>It tests the candidates ability to deal with inane bovine-faeces.
Good test, no? Some candidates can handle it, and some will buckle and walk away.

>>55827785
It's a test of obedience.

You questioned his authority, so you failed.

>>55830488
That really is a more difficult one, cause it requires knowledge about things you can be off by a factor of 2, 5, or even 10. But if you declare your margins of error it should be allright.

I've no idea how big the size of manhattan is, so let's say it's roughly a rectangle of 5x2km. Let's estimate the medium building occupies an area of 20x20m and is 8 stories high, and windows are 2.5 meters including the spaces within. Rest is trivial calculating.

>>55830554
Some candidates are also willing to work as fry cooks for McDonald's.

>>55830427
>>55830460
I don't play golf, okay? I thought they'd be like 3.5 inches, but I probably haven't seen a golf ball since I was a kid with smaller hands.

>>55830569
No wonder you'll not get hired with such shit lame excuses.
So it's like 5 cm, a school bus is 200cm high, 300cm wide and 1500cm long, that's 40x60x300 golf balls makes 72k golf balls.
Now it may be off by 10x or something but at least it's an estimate and it shows the interviewer how you think, which in your case is clearly not very much.

>>55830566
You are right. They do not ask maths questions at McDonalds.

>>55830591
But I estimated 100k which is good. ):

>>55830417
>Commie
>French invention
AMERICAN EDUCATOIN

>people itt defending this autistic interview question and HR/shit-eating corporates in general
disgusting

>>55827847

Explain as you're working it out, make your own assumptions on the size of a golf ball and the internal volume of the bus, minus the volume of the seats, and give an approximate answer.

They're not looking for the correct answer to within a square centimetre, they're looking for your problem solving and logic thinking skills.

>>55827785
You should've formed a ballpark estimate. Buses vary in size, so you can make that bit up, say, your bus is as long as a 4 family saloons bumper-to-bumper, so about 18m. Height, around 2.5m inside the bus. Single decker. Width, 4 chairs +1 person standing wide, so about 2.5m.

From which calculate the volume of the bus; now, this isn't fully vacant, considering the frontal engine space, chairs, etc., estimate a 85-90% vacancy, and thus find your vacant volume.

A gold ball has a diameter of about 41mm, but you could estimate that anyhow - so you know the volume of a golf ball.

Lastly you need to consider the packing fraction - as the balls are small consider every space as a small cube, say 5 balls in edge length, and use your head to estimate the packing fraction (alternatively, if you know things about spherical packing, ~75% is perfect packing, and ~64% is random packing) - take the effective volume, multiply by the packing factor, and then divide by the ball volume to find the number of balls.

It's just an exercise in making a rationalised estimate and explaining your reasoning.

>>55830602
You act like it's a privilege to be working at a shitty company.

>>55829643
You are an idiot if you really think that. Those kind of "Fermi problems" are used pretty often to judge the problem solving skills of an applicant. It's not so much about having the right answer in the end, it's about showing that you know how to solve the problem. Stuff that becomes apparent:

>The applicant is confident enough to even try to solve the problem
Meaning, do anything but saying "I don't know man". It's about taking responsibility and knowing what you can or can't say. Also about obedience.
>The applicant is able to recognize what information is needed to solve the problem
Meaning not just saying a number that is gathered by imagining the whole thing. It's about being able to give good reasons for your decisions instead of just asking people to trust your intuition.
>The applicant can estimate the information mostly by intuition
Maybe you know the exact dimensions of a golf ball because you like to play golf. It shows whether you have a good idea of reality and some experience with random stuff.
>The applicant can do some mathematics in his head.
You don't need to be rain man, but you need to show that you can help yourself, maybe with some creative solutions (simplifying the numbers in a way to make the task simpler etc).
>The applicant knows about his errors and what to do to improve the result
Maybe he forgot how to convert units, or has no idea how wide a bus really is etc. If he at least knows what he needs to find out, then it doesn't really matter.

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>>55828136
>imperial system fundamentalist calling someone else a nigger

>>55830620
If u don't like it dont go to a corporate interview :^)

>>55830620
The core point of the Interview is to be able to ask for the dimensions, thus proving you are not an retarded idiot who can't socialize;
and to make an estimate based on painting the picture in your brain, thus proving your core brain functions weren't harmed when your whore mother was attempting to shit you out of her asshole at birth because her vagina was too nonfunctional for its purpose and her body identified you as a big turd rather than a human being.

>>55830630
US uses imperial.

>>55830645
I know exactly what these types of problems are intending to assess. They do not do a good job of doing so, and are a sign that something is wrong with the company asking these questions. It's better to just not waste your time.

>>55830659
Science, however, does not. Note that all major scientific journals, US or otherwise, require the metric system to be used as part of their editorial standards.

>>55830659
STEM encourages metric there m8.
The uneducated retarded masses use imperial.

>>55828906
125cm3 you fag

>>55830620
I feel interviews by managers/HR-clowns in general are just about the most stupid way of deciding who to hire you can imagine. The sane way to do it would be to have every candidate come and actually work with his potential co-workers for half a day the way he would during the job, and when you've seen all candidates, the other employees collectively decide by rangevoting and a subsequent 2 hour discussion (where ideally no manager is present) who to give the job to.

>>55828029
here is the correct answer: next time light a blunt to to " go deep".

>>55830670
They actually are a brilliant way to show those things. Even if you fail because you are too nervous or an arrogant twat like you, then it did a good job of showing that you have an underdeveloped personality and a shitty work ethic.

>>55830670
>They do not do a good job of doing so
what would do a better job?

>>55830670
They're fairly good actually - it's not just about testing analytical capabilities, the entire job interview is designed to be a personality test; it often doesn't come across as a controlled environment, but they're typically very rehearsed.

>>55830697
> the other employees collectively decide by rangevoting and a subsequent 2 hour discussion (where ideally no manager is present) who to give the job to.
Great, now you have the hottest bitches getting the job or the coolest guys, people will vote based on how much they like the person not how skillful the person is. Frankly, if the candidate's skill doesn't impact them directly as in no team projects they'd be tempted to pick the less skilled one so there would be less competition.

>>55830722
Yes. Anyone who does not want to work at your shitty company is an arrogant twat with a shitty work ethic.

Another thing with the type of people who ask these questions is that they think that they are superior than the candidate, and that the interview is just for assessing the candidate for the position, when it really goes both ways.

>>55830682
Be sure to say to the interviewer.

>>55830762
>I only do things that are 100% in compliance with what *I* want and what *I* think
aka having you own stubborn head in your way, aka as shitty work ethic. Sometimes you have to make compromises and if you are incapable to do that, you don't deserve a job with responsibility.

>>55830758
As an aside, for jobs that matter you generally do have the hottest bitches getting the job. One of the main differences in the way women work is how they build and utilise networks - they normally don't do that much work themselves, but have a great ability to delegate to the correct parties. So yeah, you want the hottest.

>>55830758
>people will vote based on how much they like the person not how skillful the person is.
yeah, as opposed to the current system.

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>>55830722
>underdeveloped personality
Literally what ? Kek, anon trying hard to into psychology making shit up along the way.
There's no such thing as a developed personality, get the fuck out of here with your broscience, the fact that you can't even find logical arguments to support retarded interview questions tells us enough things about how useful they actually are.

>>55830795
Oh believe me, I do have to make compromises at my job. It's just not a good idea to stay in the hiring process of a company with such a glaring red flag.

>>55830801
But a manager's job is finding the right people, if you favor someone and they end up sucking at the job your ass is on the line. The consequences wouldn't be as harsh for group of employees who picked the wrong person, they aren't even qualified for this.

>>55830812
Sounds like I hit a spot there.

Anyway, yes, there is such a thing. Some people are more reflected than others. They live among other people, know their weaknesses and know how to make things work anyway. Then there are people that spent most of the time in a basement avoiding conflicts.

>>55830814
>Oh believe me
You give me very little reason to do that m8

>>55830874
What don't you believe about me? Is it really that hard to believe that people might need to compromise when working with others as a group? There's really no need to do so at the interview stage though. There are so many companies hiring out there, if something is off about one you always can drop them and look for others.

>>55830892
>you always can drop them and look for others.
And get blacklisted. You really think HRs don't keep in touch with each other? If the HR think you offended them, you'll be blacklisted across the board.

>>55830913
Again, that only applies for the shitty companies. If I don't even get to the interview stage because I was blacklisted, then that just saves me the trip.

>>55830874
>Sounds like I hit a spot there.
Sure thing, you proved that you have no idea what you're talking about and pulling things out of your ass.
>avoiding conflicts.
Avoiding conflicts when you can is generally a good thing.
>Then there are people that spent most of the time in a basement
He needs to create fictional, exaggerated and comical characters in order to prove a point.
This or you're just projecting at this point.

Yeah, we got it brah. Those test are actually meant to prove if you're a true alpha male that deserves the job or not, brah. We can't have weaklings running around the firm, we need strong independent bootlickers.

>>55830923
Didn't you hear what I said? I said across the board, that means you'll get black listed from a wide range of companies in your area, probably the only ones who would be able to pay you above minimum wage.

>>55830930
I never found any trouble getting job offers.

>>55830925
The behaviour of the people who are morally offended by the question is identical to the behaviour of the people who have no clue how to start solving it.

You don't want the latter type of person.

Also, I'm really not sure how you could hate these without also sucking at problem solving and abstract thought (and therefore sucking at programming).

>>55830892
>What don't you believe about me?
I don't believe that you have a job with responsibility, I don't believe that you need to regularly have to make responsibility and I don't believe that you could even judge that. Honestly, I don't think you even have a job at all, you sound like some retarded NEET making these things up as you go.

>>55830925
>Avoiding conflicts when you can is generally a good thing.
Not generally, no. I have no idea why you would think that.

The rest is just pointless ad hominem, so I'm going to ignore that.

>>55830950
>works on my machine
Cool

>>55827785

It's a "brain teaser".

It's not about the answer, it's about your problem solving skills, how you think. They want something like this:

"OK, let's assume 50 people get in a bus, and let's say theoretically you could fit 100 people in (without any free room at all).
The golf ball density is about the same as people. A person is about 69 kg, a golf ball about 300 g, so one person would be equal to
69.000 / 300 = 690 / 3 = 230 golf balls.

So for 100 people it would be 230 * 100 = 23.000 golf balls."


Of course every of my assumtions was wrong, but sometimes I was too high and sometimes too low.

But funny enough this guy here >>55828061 had a completely different approach and is in the same magnitude as I am - without ANY informations about the bus!

So it will probably be something like 20k to 200k golf balls.

>>55830965
I do though.

>>55830965
>someone else says something you don't agree with
>WAHHH WAHHH WAHH YOU MUST BE AN UNEMPLOYED NEET

>>55830983
>and let's say theoretically you could fit 100 people in
You forgot the ceiling m8. Add 25%-30% of the number to compensate for the area between the ceiling and the shoulders and heads of the people.

>>55831157

It was a veyr bad guess, I know, I just wanted to show OP how you can present a solution withonly 2 simple calculations..

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>>55830473
>autist refuses to work for a company with a $10/hr recruiter

I feel like this question does exactly what it's supposed to do.

>>55831243
If a company only pays $10/hr for recruiters, then what does that tell you about the quality of employees that they bring in?

>>55831255
Recruiters are trash and should be paid accordingly.

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>>55831255
It's a stop-gap. If you can't even impress a taco-bell worker, then you don't deserve to join the company.

>>55831282
Sounds really egotistical. There are other companies out there. Why should I want to work for yours?

>>55831330
>Why should I want to work for yours?
No one forced you to come to the interview. In fact, if you are at the interview, that shows you are interested.

>>55827785
Get up and leave. Any interviewer who asks that brainteaser bullshit, copied the questions off google and doesn't have a brain of their own. You don't want to work with people like that.

In my interview for my current job, I was asked Java questions and Java questions only. No "what's your greatest weakness." No why is a "manhole round." No of that bullshit. Couldn't be happier.

>>55831779
You can't always tell if a company is shit just from looking online. Sometimes you need to come to a interview to realize to stay the fuck away.

>>55830554
If you're going to go with the kind of shit-eating logic then you should only ask retarded questions that insult the interviewee's intelligence and wastes his time because obviously people don't hire based on skill or value, but how much corporate unlubed assfucking they can endure. Which obviously corporate types prefer the latter

>>55828001
>I would be a falcon! I'd soar through the air and strike down upon lesser birds. Did you know that Peregrine falcons dive-bomb at over 200 miles per hour? That's about 321.8 kilometers per hour-- I only mention this in case you aren't one for the imperial units.

Easy.

>>55828001
>what kind of animal I would be
I'll be a peacock and you gotta let me fly

>>55827785

>not slowly unzipping your trousers while giving the interviewer an exact answer "two hundred thirty one thousand eight hundred twelve" before urinating on him and his desk, then calmly walk away.

Should have told him "I tried this once and managed to get 782,849 golf balls into the bus before sealing it. The children were still inside, though."

>>55830656
>proving you are not a retarded idiot that can't socialize
You don't have to be autistic to assume you can't ask for help in an interview puzzle. Perhaps the interviewer has been reacting poorly to questions already. At any rate, it's an artificial environment that has little to do with normal work interactions.

1. What's the volume of a school bus
2. What is the ratio of golf ball/air for an arbitrary volume
3. Apply to bus volume
4. Impress the recruiter with your exceptional problem-solving skills

>>55830697
>every candidate
This is gonna work great with hundreds of applicants, I'm sure. You generally have to weed out the obviously unqualified ones with something like fizzbuzz, and then you're already doing an interview so why not do the whole thing?

>>55828061
>"""""""""""basic""""""""""

Should have showed him this video
http://www.pornhub.com/view_video.php?viewkey=ph576954a318aca

>>55830375
What kind of school bus though?

Either way it doesn't matter and you can derive a general formula and plug in the size later

>>55830027
>ask fedora tier questions to an applicant and expect them to waste their time appeasing your edge

No. Enjoy hiring Pajeet instead when the liberals accuse you of lacking diversity in the company.

>>55833482
I imagine they exactly want to filter out people who would ask more questions instead of providing an answer.

>>55828126
You forgot the packing density of spheres which is around 75% in R^3.

>>55830317
>what's the angle between the minute hand and hour hand when it's 3:15
I wrote a program on my TI-83+ to in 9th grade to calculate that because it was part of our geometry class

>>55828243

Remind me what was the sauce for this?

Google: 90% of our engineers use the software you wrote (Homebrew), but you can’t invert a binary tree on a whiteboard so fuck off.

>>55829643

This.

I'm aware this is done by some companies as a legitimate interview question for positions with need for highly analytical problems such as Google. But the trend of some low-tier startup companies asking this for some shit position to a 22 year old is absolutely hilarious, the freshmen in this thread defending this have no idea how the real world works if you think this is done as anything beyond making the company appear as some kind of Google-ish startup.

>>55830417
Top bants yank. Do you still call them imperial measurements (hinting to the British colonial rule) or are they called freedom-lenghts?

>>55830317
>what's the angle between the minute hand and hour hand when it's 3:15
But it's zero, what kind of question is that?

>>55827785
You should have said you would measure the golf balls and the volume of the car and do the math.

>>55833755
Google doesn't ask these types of questions. This idea that they did was promoted by BuzzFeed and Business Insider and other clickbait sites.

i only got 2 balls n they arent for golf lol

>>55830552
>360 / 12 / 4 degrees
What? The hour part is divided into 5 blocks which are exactly one minute long for the minute hand, did they mean how much of a change in degrees the minute hand would go before it turned exactly 3:16? Then that's 360/12/5 which is 6 degrees per minute change so 6x60=360 in a hour.

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>people defending this shit
>le test your reezoning and preblem slving skillz

Because it has everything to do with your ability to work with Java. Just sit down, shut the fuck up, and get to work Pajeet.

>>55833688
In the end, the issue was that they were looking for a specific optimal solution for space and a solution that was "almost right" but over an order of magnitude faster.

He just gave them a textbook answer instead and still got that wrong.

>>55833908
Hour hands gradually move forward over the course of an hour. At 3:15, the hour hand has moved one quarter of the way to 4, while the minute hand is at 3.

>>55833918
A developer without the ability to estimate unknowns is not going to be building very scalable systems.

>>55833918
>being content to be nothing more than a code monkey

>>55833918
>intelligence tests are irrelevant to programming

>>>/tumblr/

>>55827911
I've walked out of an interview once about 10 years ago. The company I was interviewing with had a fairly tedious involvement with unions, which I didn't know at the time, and one of the interviewers was waving her union flag hard.

She asked a question about contracts and "social work laws" (I don't know the translation, but it's basically an agreement between employers and employees nationally regarding safety, work regulations, etc). The question was about privacy at the workplace in the context of web browsing and e-mail traffic. Think "a sysadmin spying on users" and "a sysadmin opening files he shouldn't" etc etc

She asked me about preventing people to access resources that are harmful on the web and how to deal with people accessing sites they shouldn't be using. Once I explained how to deal with web traffic and proxies she got going on that it would violate the privacy of users. This particular set of laws doesn't allow a sysadmin to look at the contents of traffic, but you can legally draw up statistics, inspect the headers of certain traffic (like e-mail headers, HTTP headers, etc). It doesn't really matter since the whole thing is vague as hell.

I pointed out to her that there was a fairly simple solution: whitelist only things that you need and block the rest. Things just went from bad to worse then and there. She started ranting about who was to decide what resources she needed to do her job, and when I told her that management was to do that she got really frustrated.

>>55834038
Oh shit, I get it now.

>>55832155
Why would you want to work there?

>>55827785
you retard you should've said I don't know it's a psychological question, just so they can test whether you have an inflated/know it all ego.
fucking autists !

>>55834113
She got frustrated because you were being an unreasonable little bitch to arbitrary positions of authority, and that is very insulting to people with a modicum of intelligence because treating management like the only beings with free will is a mode of operation for an organization that hires very stupid people who can't think for themselves.

>Management knows what you need
>you shouldn't use anything else
>hurr it's work, you are management's slave right now
>follow policy

>>55834113
You can safely walk out of any interview that has a woman in it, because women are unstable, emotional and pretty much just badly engineered copies of men.

>>55827785
Do you realize that the guy asking you had all info written on his paper and all you had to do is ask for informations, don't you? He wanted you to prove you're capable of realizing and asking others what you need to know to complete the task.

>>55834113
She kept hammering the legal aspects of privacy at the workplace, referring to it much like a lawyer would (Article X Section Y Subsection Z), and I'm not a lawyer. I'm aware of what I can and legally can't do, and when in doubt you contact legal, but this hambeast of a union rep kept going on and on, even after on multiple occasions saying quite clearly that I wouldn't decide what she could and could not do, nor that I would be spending my precious time on reading people's traffic she kept going back to that topic.

It went on and on for about half an hour where she was making up these social conflicts at the workplace between staff and management and presenting them from a union point of view. You noticed that everyone in this interview was rolling their eyes, but nobody interrupted it.

I decided that it would be best not to take a job there. I said "I'm terribly sorry, but this interview has made it clear that this company is not the one I'm looking for. I sincerely doubt you need a network administrator to solve these kinds of issues, but more of a person who can build a bridge between the unions and management. Thank you for this interview, it was very enlightening." I walked out wishing everyone a nice day and whistled my way out the door.

I got a job at another company the same week doing far more interesting work than the network admin stuff. Their interview didn't involve any union flag waving, although there were the usual bullshit questions.

I don't think there's a problem with walking out of an interview if you don't like what you hear. Just don't burn bridges on purpose.

>>55827785
4

I can hold about 3 golf balls along the length of my hand, and I'm about 10 hands tall. ~2 hands wide and ~1 thick. So around 540 golf balls is my volume. A school bus has around 20 rows of seats. And if it was a straight seat across you could seat ~6 people across. So that's sitting space for 120 people. I'd guess the overhead space doubles that and other empty space is another people. So 360 * 540 golf balls. ~200,000 golf balls. Number is probably low because people pack worse than golf balls.

When I don't fall asleep instantly, I start to imagine throwing golf balls one by one into an empty bus. I fall asleep long before any part of it looks even remotely full.

>>55828168
Depends
With clothes on or naked?

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I'll try.

Average school bus length would be 10 m, say 3 m wide and 3 m tall we are looking at 90 m^3. One cubic meter is 1,000,000 cm^3 so 90 million cm^3. Since this is an estimate we'll treat the golf balls as cubes, say one golf ball is 5 cm across, we're looking at 125 cm^3. At this point I would want pencil and paper or a calculator but 90 million / 125 is 720,000.

That doesn't sound too far off. I bet you could lay 10,000 golf balls across the floor, and repeat that process 72 times (stacking on top of each other) before the bus was full. I'd guess what they are looking for is some answer in the hundreds of thousands.

Wolfram alpha gives 650,000
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=how+many+golfballs+can+fit+in+a+schoolbus

I conducted interviews for programming positions and I personally would not ask this. I always tried to stick to the programming language. This question really tests your spatial thinking, I think a better question for a programming position would be more abstract.

>>55828001
Good. Fucking beastiality testing you

>>55828126
>centimeters
>applicant confirmed homosexual
>no job for u

>>55828232
Considering OP completely failed the question, obviously not everyone would follow simple logic.

It also tests how quick witted you are. You seem like a confident keyboard commando, but could you do the same fermi estimate without a calculator or even a piece of paper and pen in front of an interviewer waiting for you to answer?

Chances are, 99.999999999% of /g/ would fail due to being autistic fucks.

>>55834859
If you're asking a question which you think 99.999999999% of people would fail, then you are just wasting time. 1 in 100 billion people would be able to succeed. Good luck finding that person, since there are only around 7 billion people alive.

>>55834650
>Wolfram alpha gives 650,000
>http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=how+many+golfballs+can+fit+in+a+schoolbus
I came up with 750,000 using my head and nothing else. Amazing how logic works.

>>55834650
My guess was 500,000

>>55834929
>If you're asking a question which you think 99.999999999% of people would fail, then you are just wasting time. 1 in 100 billion people would be able to succeed. Good luck finding that person, since there are only around 7 billion people alive.
99.999999999% people on /g/, meaning all of /g/.

Thanks for failing simple logic once again, autists of /g/.


Think of it this way:
You're hiring someone and need a specific skillset.

Do you:
A) Hire someone with that skillset from /g/
B) Hire someone with that skillset that you can actually communicate with and doesn't smell like shit?

>>55834989
>hurr durr if he doesn't like the interview questions I ask he must be autistic
Good luck hiring anyone other than Pajeet. Again, anyone not desperate for a job would know to stay the fuck away from a company with that kind of atmosphere.

I was asked this question once too, but I was applying for the golf ball into school bus packer position. I really don't see how it is relevant to any other field. Seems like a waste of time.

>>55834949
It's not too bad of a question, I can do mental arithmetic with large numbers, just much faster with a pencil admittedly. I think any answer in the hundreds of thousands could be considered okay, they want to see if you can do a rough estimate.

I wouldn't ask this during a programming interview though because it's testing your spatial reasoning skills. It would be a great question for someone interviewing to be a mechanical engineer. I think a much better analogue of this question, for a programming interview, would be to give the big O for some algorithm.

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>>55835146
Good for you. I could see it being a logical career choice for someone who started out as a fudge packer.

>>55832666
Nice reference. +1

>>55833822
You must be 18 to post here.

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>>55834949
>>55834650
>scholl bus is a cuboid
yeah ok

>>55834113
>>55834334
It sounds like you made the right decision if they actually got mad at you for wanting to filter internet traffic as a sys admin.

>>55827946
This desu desu

>>55827785
>I asked him why is he asking me this.
>I feel like I failed it

Yes, you failed. You should have answered their question without showing any questioning of their authority. Why would they hire you when they could hire someone who will serve them without question?

>>55834113
>>55834334

You're an autist..

1. You are actually arguing FOR censorship when their policy about privacy is actually really cool? --> Fucking autismo!

2. You are arguing with your empoyer at a job interview? --> Double autismo!


I think it's save to say their job interview questions are pretty good if they manage to keep off guys like you.

>>55836695
can you imagine a developer interrogating his manager and nitpicking about big picture shit every time he's asked to do something?

i'd fucking fire him

>>55827946
It's part psychology, part reasoning ability.

Story time:
I interviewed with an insurance company for my first programming position out of college. In fact the interview was on campus as part of a job fair. There wasn't a single technical question, which bothered me, because I spent time reviewing technical things beforehand. The interviewer was a female. I don't remember most of the questions, they were fluffy personality questions, except one that stood out.

She asked how I would handle a coworker who isn't motivated to do work. I said you should speak to them and see if there are any roadblocks preventing them from doing their work. She said what if that doesn't work, I said ask them if there is any way you can help. She then said what if they say no and still don't want to work. I said if it becomes a problem, and they really don't want to be there, you go to management. The entire time she was writing furiously on a notepad.

I didn't get the job and looking back on it that was probably a good thing.

>>55827785
You are supposed to say "I don't know but if you would like I can make an educated guess."

Interviewers want to see that you are honest and can admit when you don't know something, that's why they will ask questions like "How much does Boein 747 weigh?", it's not important that you actually know the answer, it's important how you handle the reality of not knowing it.

>>55827785
>Today I was asked in an interview, " how many golf balls can fit into a school bus?"

no you weren't

>>55836820
good post

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>>55836820
This happens all the time.

I was once asked how many times an elephant weighted more than a rat.

The facts don't matter, they just want you to put down your estimates and do the math in front of them.

>>55836874
I know it happens all the time. This is a very common interview question. I'm just saying I don't think OP is telling the truth

>>55834113
>he is a fag
>he hates privacy

>>55836942
why are you voicing this skepticism? is some aspect of it so unbelievable that you want to stop this thread on that basis?

>>55836942
I think (or thought) it's widely understood that everything on 4chan needs to be taken with a grain of salt.

I guess I'm glad you're realizing this now, but most of us have been operating with the "tacitly accepting the premise but not really believing anything we read here" approach for years.

Welcome to reading shit on the internet.

>>55833515
didn't even think of that, you probably got the job already

I assume it's to gage intuition/estimation abilities. I doubt it mattered much to your overall performance if you did good enough on everything else.

>>55830432
>thinks everyone else is stupid
>thinks he isn't the sperg

>>55830494
>can't divide lengths by 2, 3, 4
>can't be free

>>55829674
>Same thing with FizzBuzz: it's not there to show you can program, but that you can think programmatically.

FizzBuzz is literally one of the easiest challenges out there. It's there to make sure you know how to program. Way too many people bullshit their resumes nowadays. If you cant at the very least FizzBuzz, then gtfo.

>>55833568
this

>>55827785
80 mil if it's a standard 40ft school bus.
40 mil if it's the type op went to school in.

>>55835967
We're presumably not allowed to put golf balls in the engine compartment...

>>55837897
The top is curved, did you ever go on a school bus?

>>55837805
you're several orders of magnitude off, which makes me think you might've been in the same bus as OP but for different reasons.

>>55835967
>>55837939
>>55837897
are you guys unintentionally missing the point? like are you two doing some vaudeville thing where you get hung up on the periphery of the actual point?

>>55836788

You're such a faggot. Your coworkers are not your problem, they're your boss' problem. Of course they wouldn't hire a retard like you who thinks he's gonna save the world.

>>55837818
lol. What was his plan, had he actually be able to get the position? Wing it? Stack overflow?

>>55837085
>>55837110
It reads like a story. Even if we accept that OP was dumb enough to just say "20000 lol" there are no details specific to his experience that we can learn from . So what value does his "story" bring to the board? Maybe he didn't think he'd get enough replies if he just said "hey guys, what do you think about the golfball interview question?".

How many mugs can fit into a house?
>How big are the mugs?
>How big is the house?
Thank you for your time. We'll call you.

Why can't we find someone who can just give us a straight answer??

>>55837986
I wouldn't hire someone who just expects me to put their fires out all day long. I have better things to do.

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>>55827785
>I told him probably at least 20,000.

reminder
>Never hire anyone from /g/

>>55837956
Why do you assume there are no seats or passengers in the bus?

>>55838187
Are we to assume the bus hasn't already been filled with balls?

>>55833513
> I imagine they exactly want to filter out people who would ask more questions
They'll end up with people who will do stupid shit without asking questions.

I would like to hear the autistic reaction or response of /g/ to the "sell me this pen" test

>>55828243
Come'n with that sauce, I see that you cut off the actual title of it.. that was.. helpful.

>>55828843
I always went to a school on foot, it's just 30 minutes away.

>>55838187
the assumption is that there are seats in the bus because that's part of a bus. passengers are not part of a bus.

honestly, these kinds of questions are good. signal quickly to your interviewer that you're either autistic or so socially inept that you'd rather ask obnoxious needling questions than expedite an awkward interview process.

if you have a really insightful question, by all means ask it, but if you're just nitpicking the details of a hypothetical, ask yourself if you or your counterpart will be any better for it if you ask the question in your head.

>>55835229
Sure, algorithms are nice, but I think I'd rather pay for them with the money than have to give sexual favours

>>55838501
what kind of job do you ahve

>>55838501
Why would you ever not ask for details in any real-world application?

>>55830404
You're way the fuck off. . This is why God gave us AIDS. Thanks.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=how+many+golf+balls+will+fit+in+a+school+bus

>>55838428
Here's a useful tip:

If you're thinking about asking a question or making a comment, really reflect on whether it will add to the conversation. If someone asks you how many golf balls will fit in a bus in an interview, ask yourself if you think it helps move the conversation forward to tell the interviewer that you walked to school. Do you think he'll be especially happy to have learned that little factoid about you?

This commentary you're offering is obnoxious. At some point I would honestly get pretty terse and say something to cut the interview off - maybe some excuse like I'm running behind on some deadlines - and ask you to see yourself out. If that's what you want (to end the interview early), then just end it yourself. If you don't want that, then stop acting like a dickwad.

I didnt do good in the interview that got me my current job (a good one and well paying one at that) for software eng. I kind of flopped around the technical questions, but I kept my cool and was able to do well in other aspects. I showed some passion too, and that seemed to be what they were really looking for.

They just want to see how you work out a problem and respond to it.

Some people are just bad fucking interviewers too.

>>55838653
You didn't do well*

>>55838555
I'm a researcher.

>>55838589
you should ask questions, but the questions should be ones that:
- matter
- are not obvious
- can be answered

there are thousands of models of bus in the world. it should be obvious to you that the specific model of bus isn't that important to the interviewer (unless they manufacture buses). if you care enough to specify, just plant a metaphorical flag in the ground and say "I'm going to assume a typical yellow school bus if that's all right" and then move on.

asking questions like "what kind of bus? does it have chairs in it?" etc... is clearly taking the piss out of the interviewer, and highlighting the waste of time that this whole interview process is for him. but it doesn't highlight that his existence is a waste of time - it highlights that *you* are wasting his time.

>>55828099
are you crazy by that measurements and if the ball is 1.68 in3 it would be about 2.7 Million balls after taking 30%

>>55838676
Keep your corrections to yourself gurl. Or are you an english major who can't find a job?

>I didn't perform perfectly in the interview
Would be more apt to what I was trying to get across.

>>55828136
only country that have niggers use imperial

>>55838735
good and perfectly don't even have the same meaning or connotations

>>55838735
I didn't perform optimally in the interview*

just kidding. ignore autistic people on /g/ or you'll spend 20% of your time making posts and 80% of your time explaining retarded shit to autistic people who either A) think they're so clever for acting stupid, or B) actually are this stupid.

>>55827785
you don't need any numbers

volume of bus - volume of the contents in the bus = "empty" volume (assuming you're not allowed to rearrange or remove any contents already in the bus, chairs, railing, poles, etc)

then you use the volume of a golf ball divided into the remaining "empty" volume.

Throw in a bit of aftermarket lattice knowledge buy proposing that they calculate the space between the golf balls in the lattice to see if the volume of that space is < the volume of the ball then insert ball.

they just want to see you think.

>>55838631
> Do you think he'll be especially happy to have learned that little factoid about you?
Do you think I come to an interview to make HRs happy? Pffffffft. If he wants the answer from me, he should provide me with the details. If he can't and still demands the answer, it won't work out.
> stop acting like a dickwad
1) No U.
2) Stop discriminating me, I'll sue your company because you're rejecting autists.

>>55832082
You're getting way too buttflustered about opinions on the internet, anon. Go outside for a bit.
On topic, the only reason you get questions like that is because it's a valuable ability to take a problem and come up with an estimate in very short amounts of time.

Why would anyone want to fill a bus with balls?

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>>55828126
>cm

>>55838931
>Do you think I come to an interview to make HRs happy?
that is exactly what you're doing there. if you think you're not showing up to make someone feel good enough about you to offer you money to come work in their vicinity, then you're a retard. if you want to test that, try doing everything right in an interview while making socially uncomfortable advances. see how many job offers you get given that you've made them uncomfortable around you.

if you can bring a doctor's note that you're autistic, maybe someone will carve out a role for you, but if you make a dozen women feel uncomfortable at the office, try and imagine how it would look for you to be in court arguing against a dozen pretty, likable women that you should be allowed to be socially awkward around them.

if anything, you'll set back people with asperger's by several decades. a judge will decide that autists don't have a right to make people uncomfortable even though you have no control over it, and women will get even more power.

so with any luck someone will shoot you before any of that happens. otherwise, thanks for making the workplace even worse for the rest of us.

>>55839025
please stop typing up paragraphs to bait

These kinds of questions are asked in business interviews too, 'estimate the market size of toothpaste in France' they want to see your reasoning and so long as your estimates are reasonable the answer isn't super important

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>job interview
>get asked ridiculous question like OP but with cars and roads
>cmon man you need to give me more info to answer
>anon this question is just to gauge your mental faculties, see if you think outside the box, do what we need
>so the job is guessing shit?
>I'm still unemployed

>>55830317
i just took about 30 seconds to think about it...

I'd say for a massive city like NY - about 1.5 million

And for the clock hands...15 degrees?

>>55839711
>15 degrees?
exactly half that, actually.

a golf ball is roughly 4 cms in diameter.
that means you could fit about 25^3 golf balls in 1 cubic metre.
now, depending on how big the bus is, and how much space is occupied by interior details and eventual children, you'd be able to figure out an answer.