Braintaser questions.

Always seemed pretty goofy to me.

It might be because of IQ tests?

Thankfully, nobody has ever asked me brainteaser questions in any of the interviews I’ve been in.

Decades ago, I was interviewing in England, and in the middle of a discussion about solving a particular problem, the interviewer asked — out of the blue and without missing a beat — “what is the cube root of 27?“. Completely unrelated to the problem we were discussing. Apparently, they did this to all candidates to see if “solving a random math problem” derailed their thinking about the main problem being discussed. I declined their offer.

At the end of the interview, the interviewer commented that my surname was unusual and they had a Corfield on their board and asked if I knew Sir Kenneth… “Yes, he’s my uncle”. “Does he know you’re interviewing with us?“. “No, we haven’t spoken in over a decade — I doubt he’d even recognize me”. The interviewer thought it might be amusing to “introduce him to his nephew”… :face_with_rolling_eyes:

Ouch!

amusing? sounds like someone couldn't take a hint

For the current job I had to answer questions about integer factorization. Fwiw, this was not at the technical interview because we didn't really had one, so this was just at the end, last interview with one of the founders. Also, I kinda understand it, it's a finance job, it would be really difficult to make for example charts fast if I haven't had good arithmetic skills. Still, I had to double check if I understood it correctly because it was such a simple question, I expected trickery 🙂. There was none.