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posted by martyb on Friday October 05 2018, @03:21PM   Printer-friendly
from the boss-wants-to-see-how-you-handle-pressure? dept.

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.


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  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 05 2018, @09:30PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 05 2018, @09:30PM (#744806)

    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.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 06 2018, @12:45AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 06 2018, @12:45AM (#744875)

    But the interviewer in Zinho's interview wasn't using it to exclude non-visual thinkers.

    He admitted, after I gave the correct answer, that he had no intention of giving me the job; he was told go interview me, so he was having fun with it. He had discerned that I was a visual thinker, and had heard that giving this problem to someone who thinks visually leads to amusing pantomime during the visual analysis, followed by a quick correct answer [1]. Apparently, I did not disappoint.

    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.