[tpm] Job interview question

[Peter]

On Tue, 17 Jan 2006, Byron Sonne wrote:

> Wow, now I read back in the thread and realize someone said it better. Gah.
>
> It's totally true that if you know the trick, it's easy to exploit the 
> interviewer if they're not being smart about things. But I'd submit that, 
> among the people who do eventually get hired and turn out to be great 
> additions, the incidence of trick-knowing would be astonishingly high :) 
> Anyone who posed it as a decisive question would be foolish, it's gotta have 
> context.
>
> Not that responding to your own post isn't questionable... <cough>

No problem. Even GNU chess has a 'take back step' button ;-)

The way I like to think about such questions is, that they are traps. 
The trap consists in setting up a situation that would elicit a response 
from which the questioner would benefit, without giving up anything. But 
the goal of the answerer is to make good points. Since there is a 
penalty in answering wrong, and that has a 66% probability, *not* 
answering, on which there is no defined penalty is the right answer in a 
first approach imho (as this has a lower chance of failure than 66%). 
Once the questioner wants to go on he will have to motivate and 
hopefully give some clues.

Peter
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://tlug.ss.org
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://tlug.ss.org/subscribe.shtml