Wednesday 22 June 2016

Best Interview Question Ever

A while ago, I went for an interview, during which I was asked what I now consider to be the best interview question I have ever been asked.

The interviewer had warned that "the next few questions might seem a bit strange, but don't worry, I'm going somewhere with this"...  he followed that by asking about a person who I had never heard of (and who's name I still can't remember).
When I confessed to not knowing the name, he then asked the best question I have ever heard.

What do you think of when I say "The Ultimate Evil"?
Following from the previous question, I had a mild panic that maybe there had been some atrocity in the news which I had missed, related to the previously mentioned name, and that I was about to reveal my lack of attention to current affairs.

In fact, the interviewer was probing to see how I would react to his knowledge of the computer games I played - the Ultimate Evil he was thinking of was in fact the star character of Dungeons 2 by Kalypso Media, a game that showed as recently played on my Steam account.

On the day, I dodged the question, not thinking of the game at the time - but on reflection, this would be a great question for all kinds of interviews... here's some thoughts on answers that would indicate the character of the person being asked...
  • "Love of money" - religious or classically trained
  • "Money" - a communist
  • "Windows line endings in Unix source files" - a geek
  • "Emacs Users" - a vi user
  • "Vi Users" - an Emacs user
The list goes on... what would you answer?

No comments:

Post a Comment