A good work team is essential for any company to succeed. That is why many companies have an exclusive human resources department to dedicate themselves to choose the ideal people to develop the objectives and carry out the activities and develop their products and services.
Today we are going to see the curious questions that managers of giant companies in the tech sector and software, like Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos have done in job interviews to decide who to hire:
Elon Musk and his riddle
Those who aspire to work for Tesla and SpaceX, the companies led by Elon Musk, must already imagine that the selection process is not a conventional procedure. And no, it is not. In fact, it comes with some surprise. According to an authorized biography of the tycoon, there is at least one question Musk used to ask potential employees to catch them off guard.
Specifically, according to the book by Ashlee Vance, columnist and writer, on Musk and his companies, the manager instructed the candidates to solve this riddle: you are standing on the surface of the Earth. you walk one mile south, one mile west and one mile north and you end exactly where you started. Where are you?”
It seems that most of the interviewees guessed the correct answer, which is the North Pole. Since that math problem didn’t seem to serve as a filter to screen out a lot of people, that’s when Musk threw in another surprise follow-up question: “Where else could you be?”
And there, the author of her authorized biography explains that “the other answer is somewhere near the south pole where, if you walk one mile south, the circumference of the Earth becomes one mile.” There were fewer engineers who knew the answer, and “Musk liked to guide them through problem solving,” the book says. For the manager, according to Ashlee Vance, he valued how a potential employee described the problem and his approach to solving it more than actually solving it.
Two questions from Bezos and hiring on the spot
An Amazon employee, Ann Hiat, recounted that in 2002 she posted her resume on Amazon without much expectation of success. She was called for a first interview for her assistant position. She and she spent it She did several more interviews until reaching the final process where Jeff Bezos himself, founder of this company, was present. The curious thing is not only this, but that the manager raised only two questions in that interview, which were decisive to get the job.
The first question was: “I want you to calculate the number of glass panels in the city of Seattle”. The interviewee concluded that the manager probably wanted to see how his mind works, how a potential employee manages to unravel a complicated problem in small and manageable steps. “I wrote down the number of Seattleites, which I luckily guessed correctly as a million, just to make the math easier. Then I said that each of them would have a house, a means of transportation, and an office or school, and that they would all have windows.” So I suggested we base the estimate on the averages of those items.”
He says they entered every possible scenario. He spoke for about 10 minutes as Bezos wrote on a whiteboard. And with the final estimate out, Bezos said, “It looks like it’s fine.
Then came the second question: “What are your career goals?” And Hiat says that she told him that Amazon had proven “to be a company full of ambitious and passionate people. I wanted to be like them and learn what they knew. Their strengths were in the areas that I personally wanted to develop.” Ann Hiat explained that she had no idea how to be an assistant, but she knew the importance of constantly stepping out of her comfort zone.
The professional says that now that she knows Bezos, she knows that he was measuring his potential through questions that would explore whether he had the courage and motivation to run at his pace.
Bill Gates showing how to answer questions from Microsoft
In the case of one of the founders of Microsoft, what we have is him answering the typical questions that are asked of a person who wants to work at the Redmond giant. Bill Gates was interviewed for an alleged job as a junior engineer at Microsoft by Stephen CurryNBA star, on his YouTube channel where he talks to people who inspire him.
To the question of “why should we hire you?” Gates’ response was that “you should look at the code I’ve written. Much more than going to classes, I write a lot of software.” In addition to his passion for software and showing off his projects, Gates added that “I think I can work well with people. I could criticize code harshly, but in general, I like being in a team.” Also emphasized that he liked ambitious goals, thinking about how to anticipate the future and that for him “the software is great”.
To follow up, Stephen Curry asked Bill Gates what his strengths and weaknesses are. The software expert acknowledged that what he does not know is marketing. He went on to add that he is passionate about the industry, that he has done a lot of research on the ground he is on, and that he has “read about the mistakes made” in this sector. All this to conclude that its strengths are “the definition of the product and product creation.
To the question “which are your salary expectations“, Bill Gates chose not to say any figures. “I hope the options are good” and added that, as he believes that the company has “a great future”, I would even prefer to have shares of the company rather than compensation cash.
Mark Zuckerberg and his rule for hiring
At the Mobile World Congress conference held in Barcelona in 2015, the founder of Facebook shared what he was looking for in employees. “I would only hire someone to work directly for me If I saw myself working for that personZuckerberg said.
Jay Parikh, former vice president of engineering at Facebook, said in a Harvard Business Review article that Facebook measured the teamwork capacity of the candidates to a job. So hiring managers ask, “Can you tell me four people whose careers you’ve fundamentally improved?” Parikh added that “selected candidates must clearly demonstrate that their priorities are the company, the team and themselves, in that order.”
The difficult Google questions that not even Schmidt knows
Tech giant Google (owned by parent company Alphabet) used to ask very strange questions for its male and female candidates. Like “how many ways can you think of to find a needle in a haystack?” or “If you could be remembered by one phrase, what would it be?”
In recent years, Google has removed these puzzles, but notes that during a talk at the Summit at Sea conference a few years ago, someone posed one of the interview questions to Alphabet CEO and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt: “You are the captain of a pirate ship and you find a chest of gold. Your crew votes to decide how the gold is distributed. If less than half of the pirates agree with you, you die. How do you recommend dividing up the gold so that you take a good chunk of the loot and survive?
Apparently the question caught Schmidt off guard. He asked to repeat himself and to be allowed to ask a few follow-up questions. In the end, he provided a humorous solution, assigning the gold to 51% of the pirates and giving stock options to the other 49%. Although he also said that the question was “bad”.