I recently applied for a job in Silicon Valley.
The recruiter had me take a battery of tests that measured my verbal, mathematical and visual aptitude. I'd guess it was a mini-IQ test; it wasn't a mini-MMPI. As a result of the tests I was invited to interview onsite.
At the end of the interview the manager declared that he wanted me to take some tests.
His tests were brain teasers he had downloaded from a random website. The brain teasers had nothing to do with the work I was interviewing for. He seemed to ignore the battery of sophisticated tests I had been subjected to, and to believe that he could do better.
What is the REAL purpose of using brain teasers during an employment interview?
Is it just to make the candidate feel stupid? Are any of these people qualified to interpret the results? Are any of them industrial psychologists? Or is this all about power and control?
Please advise.
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Friday October 05 2018, @04:32PM (3 children)
Are you saying the answer isn't four groups (8, 12, 6, and 1 having 3, 2, 1, and 0 painted sides) such that 8+12+6+1=27?
Or are you saying that people whose thought is insufficiently visual tend to omit the 0-side one-cube group, identifying only 26 of the 27?
(The Rubick's cube itself has no cube or portion thereof in that position, by the way, leaving space for a universal joint.)
Also, thanks for the heads-up; after hearing your warnings I was careful to visualize this without the benefit of hand manipulation...
(Score: 2) by Zinho on Friday October 05 2018, @05:34PM (2 children)
You have it right, the interviewer's assertion was that non-visual thinkers tend to omit the center cube, and only identify the 26 surface cubes. And, yes, the question explicitly avoided using a Rubik's cube as the example because tech interviewees often are intimately familiar with the inside structure of the real toy.
I take comfort knowing that I've perhaps now spoiled some other interviewer's fun by inoculating you against the pantomime. Potential revenge is mine!
"Space Exploration is not endless circles in low earth orbit." -Buzz Aldrin
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 05 2018, @09:30PM (1 child)
The irony there is that by excluding the non-visual thinkers, you're excluding the group that likely is the best for the job.
I'm more or less completely non-visual and it allows me to do things mathematically that other people struggle with because I don't have to worry about what it looks like. A banana shaped object is just the shape of a banana. I don't really have to worry about what that looks like other than to know that it's a longish yellow thing with a bit of a curve.
When doing more complicated math or engineering where you're dealing with more than a few dimensions or you're dealing with a complicated system, not visualizing can eliminate a lot of the distraction. You just have to be comfortable with the procedure from getting from one state to another and knowing how they interact. Trying to do that visually is a real mess.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 06 2018, @12:45AM
But the interviewer in Zinho's interview wasn't using it to exclude non-visual thinkers.
He posed this problem on a lark, hoping to see Zinho waving his hands in the air like a retard, but since he had only heard about it, he apparently didn't pose this question in serious interviews. (Or perhaps someone else handled the serious interviews, and this guy was hired for his time-wasting skills...)
Also, you're assuming it's a "more complicated math or engineering" job, when that's not stated. For all you know, Zinho was interviewing for a flower-arranging job.