Ok I stabbed at the fun ones. I'm not into calculating tedius stuff like ball-bearings in a 747

Some of these are kind of cool:

"Given the numbers 1 to 1,000, what is the minimum number of guesses needed to find a specific number, if you are given the hint 'higher' or 'lower' for each guess you make?" -- Facebook

10? 2^10 = 1024, so dividing in half each time should get you down to a gap of 1 in 10 folds.

"Using a scale of 1 to 10, rate yourself on how weird you are." -- Capital One (COF)

Easy. 10.

"Explain quantum electrodynamics in two minutes, starting now." -- Intel (INTC)

Just write down the Maxwell Equations and say everything follows.

"How many balloons would fit in this room?" -- PricewaterhouseCoopers

Ping pong ball question part II

"If you were shrunk to the size of a pencil and put in a blender, how would you get out?" -- Goldman Sachs (GS)

OK, weird.

"You have a bouquet of flowers. All but two are roses, all but two are daisies, and all but two are tulips. How many flowers do you have?" -- Epic Systems

2. Two carnations (or something other than roses, daisies or tulips)

"What is the philosophy of martial arts?" -- Aflac (AFL)

Weird. Aikido at least is 'do as little damage as necessary'. Maybe something about respect.

"Explain to me what has happened in this country during the last 10 years." -- Boston Consulting

Is taking a dump on the interviewers desk an acceptable answer?

"How do you weigh an elephant without using a scale?" -- IBM (IBM)

Don't know.

"If you had 5,623 participants in a tournament, how many games would need to be played to determine the winner?" -- Amazon (AMZN)

If it is single elimination, 5622. Everyone but one needs a loss. I thought it would be how many rounds, which would be a 2^n type question.

"How many bricks are there in Shanghai? Consider only residential buildings." --Deloitte Consulting

Interesting Fermi question. Enrico Fermi was famous for posing these types of questions. Helps show how you can estimate things easy.

"You have five bottles of pills. One bottle has 9 gram pills, the others have 10 gram pills. You have a scale that can be used only once. How can you find out which bottle contains the 9 gram pills?" --eBay (EBAY)

Put one pill out of the first bottle, two from the second, three from the third, etc. # of grams short of 150 grams tells you which bottle is short.

"What is your fastball?" -- Ernst & Young

70 mph?

"How would you market ping pong balls if ping pong itself became obsolete? List many ways, then pick one and go into detail." -- Microsoft (MSFT)

Beer Pong, ldo.

"How many smartphones are there in New York City?" -- Google (GOOG)

Another Fermi question.

"You are in charge of 20 people. Organize them to figure out how many bicycles were sold in your area last year." -- Schlumberger (SLB)

Don't know what to think with this one.

"Why do you think only a small percentage of the population makes over $125,000 a year?" -- New York Life

Cause their skills aren't in that much demand.

"You have three boxes. One contains only apples, one contains only oranges, and one contains both apples and oranges. The boxes have been incorrectly labeled so that no label accurately identifies the contents of any of the boxes. Opening just one box, and without looking inside, you take out one piece of fruit. By looking at the fruit, how can you immediately label all of the boxes correctly?" -- Apple (AAPL)

Pick a fruit out of the box labeled 'mixed'. That must be a pure fruit box. Whatever fruit you observe is the only fruit in that box. The box labeled with the other fruit must be the mixed box (it is labeled incorrectly, and it can only be mixed or the other fruit, therefore if it is labeled wrong it can't be the other fruit so it must be mixed). The last box is the other fruit.

"How many ball bearings, each one inch in diameter, can fit inside a 747 aircraft?" -- SAIC (SAI)

Ping pong estimation question II

How'd you get three flowers? Do I just need more sleep? (guess that might be one of my weaknesses )

Ah, I see. one of each flower also fits the problem. I just hope my '2' answer also fits.

"How many bricks are there in Shanghai? Consider only residential buildings." --Deloitte Consulting
This one is really weird since few of the communist buildings had bricks, and none of the new ones do. Also tons off old buildings were torn down. Such a ridiculous wild-ass guess. Edit: lol googling just brings back this question and no answers.

OK, for this one, my outline:

Population? 24 Million??? (WAG)
families: divide by 3 (china 1 child policy, plus singletons.)
That's about 8 million residential spaces.

Now, estimating the number of bricks (if 1/2 the population lives in brick houses/apartments?) is the really tedious part...size of a brick->how many bricks in each outside wall->x4? That part of the question isn't too interesting or too much like a good Fermi question...

No there's no way half the population lives in brick. There's like 5,000 high-rise residential buildings in Shanghai, and many of the old brick buildings are torn down.

Nice job on the pill question btw! That's brilliant.

Your flower answer does seem to work as well.

Btw I really hope someday that I get asked if a whale has ever been struck by lightning.

The flower one is 3. One rose, one tulip, one daisy.

Also given the way it is phrased, the minimum number of guesses needed to guess a random number is 1. The minimum number needed to ensure that you can find any number is higher...

Yeah, I saw someone else (or maybe you) said brick buildings aren't that prevalent in Shanghai. The process of the answer in that question is probably more important than getting the actual 'facts' correct though.

TY for the compliment on the weighing question.

Yeah that wording bugged me too.

On the flower one, I think 3 is better, but 2 carnations also technically works.

No. "All but two are roses" means there are X roses and X+2 flowers.

IE say you have X roses, Y daisies and Z tulips. x+2 = y+2 = z+2 = the total # of flowers. So x+2=y+2, then x-y=0, x=y. Same goes for the others, so we know there must be an equal number of the three flowers. Also since x+2 = the total # of flowers, that means z+y must = 2. So only solution for all of the is 1.

coffee_monser introduced a 3rd kind of flower, say w. We know w must = 1 or 2 by the same logic above. But 1 would violate x=y=z. And that means all the other flowers combined must = 0 and w must = 2. This is the only other solution. Note w could be two different types of flowers, but we're only interested in the total.

He ninja deleted. We saw that jj

I have a tendency to hit into double plays.

P.s. I actually said this and they didn't hire me.

Dammit!

By the way guys, I don't know if your answer to this one question is what is responsible for your success/failure in interviews.

interviews are for chumps

Quoted for 100% truth.

wtf. tbh if i were asked most of these idk what i'd say but it probably wouldn't be acceptable, since most of the companies i'm applying to have hr departments i guess that means i'm more likely to encounter these weird curveball questions?

any recommendations on types of questions a 22 guy trying for graduate positions in the property industry (asset development / consulting) should prepare for, or the kinds of skills / attitudes i should look to convey?

i have like 6 months of full-time work experience in a semi-related field but apart from that i have literally zero real work experience from ages 16-22 cos of poker. i'm assuming mentioning poker is a no-no for the most part

fml

Do you think these are better or worse than OP's question?

WRT to the question about how many ping pong balls one can fit in a room, presuming the interview is for an engineering or design type job, I think perhaps the best answer may be a series of questions:
"Metric or imperial sized balls?"
"Round, distorted without permanent damage, dented, crushed or melted?"
"With furniture in place or removed?"
"Are we talking about equivalent volume or actually placing the balls in the room?"
If the latter:
"Balls only, or are we allowed to use an adhesive?"
"Are we allowed to modify the room envelope to facilitate the introduction and retention of ping pong balls?"

and, of course,

"Why are we filling the room with ping pong balls?"

21. First time doing serious interviews for real jobs, and not just tempory stuff.

Text of story is better than the headline. The questions are odd, but almost none of them is ridiculous.

For any question involving packing round objects into a space, bring up

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kepler_conjecture

for bonus points.

This is good - except you usually want to phrase them as assumptions. Remember the point isn't to get a specific answer, but instead see the thought process at arriving at a reasonable answer.

I remember doing a design interview with a candidate who couldn't make any decisions himself. He'd ask a question, I'd tell him that it was up to him and he just had to give me some justification. Thirty seconds later we'd do the same thing again. After five times I just started giving him answers and knew we wouldn't hire him.

Moral of the story - the vast majority of interviewers aren't trying to trick you (and those that are - are just dicks) so always listen and believe what the interviewer is telling you.

I liked these too. I don't think you're right on this one though because 5623 isn't a power of two, though I see someone else is agreeing with you. How do you organise a single elimination tournament to get from 5623 to 1?

To get from 5623 to 4096 you need a qualifying round. That'd require knocking out 1527 players, so is 3054 games. Then to get from 4096 down to 1, you need 4095 games. That gives you a total of 7149 games.

.

edit: more importantly, forget the structure of the tourney! Every game knocks out 1 team -- period. # of teams to eliminate = # of games needed.

Ah. That's where I was going wrong then.