97. Understanding the gas station question
[From Seth Godin, Stop Stealing Dreams http://www.squidoo.com/stop-stealing-dreams]
“How many gas stations are there in the United States?”
Yet another one of those trick questions that William Poundstone writes about. Companies like Google and Microsoft are renowned for using obtuse questions (what’s the next number in this sequence: 10, 9, 60, 90, 70, 66…) often to make job seekers feel inadequate and pressured.
That wasn’t my goal. Years ago, when doing some hiring, I often asked the gas station question because in a world where you can look up just about anything, I found it fascinating to see what people could do with a question they couldn’t possibly look up the answer to (because, in this case anyway, they didn’t have a computer to help them).
Those are the only sorts of questions that matter now.
If the training we give people in public school or college is designed to help them memorize something that someone else could look up, it’s time wasted. Time that should have been spent teaching students how to be wrong.
How to be usefully wrong.
That’s a skill we need along with the dreaming.
P.S. After asking this question to more than five hundred people in job interviews, I can report that two people mailed me copies of the appropriate page from the Statistical Abstract (what a waste), and two other people said, “I don’t have a car” and walked out of the interview.
Tags: stopstealingdreams
Views: 3
© 2024 Created by Steve Hargadon.
Powered by
