Job interview questions

My boss is interviewing for a management position.  She's asking people to "describe yourself in three words."  I'm not sure how I'd answer that.  How would you describe yourself - in only three words?

And what was the worst question you've ever had to answer during a job interview?

passionate. intelligent. uncommon.

yikes, that sounds just *slightly* holier-than-thou...sorry, it was unintended. you could pretty much just boil it down to "passionate" if you wanted to.

worst question? umm... i guess i haven't had any real killers, because nothing's sticking out in my mind. for my study abroad interview in high school, i had to explain why i'd been in therapy for 8 months 2 years prior...that was a trip.

silly, white, girl

I got an odd question once during a job interview. I was asked if I'd be willing to dress up for them. I thought they meant like a dress suit or something, as it was a convention center, but that wasn't what they meant, they meant a costume. I got the job and I got to dress as a belly dancer, a princess, an angel, a bear, an alien and the worst of all, a bride. I quit the job shortly after the bride one.. I wonder if...

Not sure what the worst one was, but I know the best one. At my Yahoo! interview, what would become my boss asked just one question for a 45-minute interview. The question was:

You accidently put a fork() command in an infinite loop and ran it. What do you do?

It threw me for a loop at first because of its apparent simplicity, but it was a great question to draw out how much you understand about Unix operating systems. I guess I got the answer right, since they hired me. *grins*

Hrm, depends on how you started it.

What did you give an answer?

I think I came to the conclusion that there aren't really many good ways short of pulling the plug. The one ray of hope is on unices that support process groups, where you can kill an entire group with one command.

well, depending on what the parent PID is, you could do
ps -e| grep [name] | cut -d " " -f 1 | sort | xargs kill [-9]

and that'll kill them from the top down, cutting them off at the source. of course, by the time you realise you've done it, it's quite possible that the machine is frozen or the kernel has panicked anyway. :)

but if the parent PID is high and it wrapped around, that's a much greater challenge (although doing it twice in a row should take care of it, assuming the kills can catch up to the forks)

nope. the fork bomb will explode until all possible PIDs are taken, then will stop because there aren't any free PID slots. you still have a zillion processes in an infinite loop trying to fork again. the very instant you kill one of them, a PID slot opens up and another fork will take it. bummer, huh?

it was always amusing back in college when one of the CS classes learned the fork() command and had that assignment where you write a program that creates three copies of itself. it never fails that they'd need to reboot the devel machine a few times a day.

Back in the day...(god I'm old)...when I took assembly language for the first time, we did it on an IBM 370 mainframe. This machine ran with virtual machines for each logon. Well, we got to the branch command, and even though our teacher told us not to, I wrote a simple one line program consisting of

LOOP B LOOP

That locked up my account quite nicely.

Ah, trick question I see.  Simply answer Pull The Plug and you're right.  I don't know much about Unix other than what i learned on X-terms at college, so I wouldn't really know.

It also depends on whether or not the system supports and uses process quotas. Of course, if you ran the program as root, then you're fubared if you can't manage to kill it in the first few seconds.

You accidently put a fork() command in an infinite loop and ran it. What do you do?

run screaming.

I'd never do that. I only use sporks

curious, persistent, empathic

The worst question I've ever gotten was the overly general (and apparently ubiquitous) "Tell me about yourself."

I'm not sure if was the best question or the worst. I was asked. "If you were doing the interview what question would you ask?"

I used to think that asking someone to tell a joke would be quite good. I think a person's sense of humor says a lot about their character. But then it occurred to me that it's not really fair to ask someone to be funny when they're under all that pressure. Oh well. I guess I'm not doing any hiring anyways so it doesn't matter.

"I would ask "If you were doing the interview what question would you ask?""

Do I see an infinite loop coming on?

Yeah, I often use that one when I'm doing interviews.

I would say...

And I was asked to estimate the coefficient of thermal expansion for mercury.

Oh, Jonathan, you get *big* nerd points for that one.

independent, tenacious, inquisitive..

hardest question? ummmm...well, the hardest question to not laugh at was something like "We are looking for someone who is willing to give 110%. Can you work hard?" What? You mean I don't get to sit at a desk and eat cookies and milk all day? I'm crushed. Dumbass.

Wasn't for a job, but for school:

"One of your Reference Letters says you have a marvelous sense of the absurd.  Could you say something absurd for us?"

I wonder if they would have thought it absurd if you simply didn't give a response to that.  :)

Did you answer "I don't have to, you just did it for me."?

Which is hands down what I would have said.

That is hands down what I would've said too, if I hadn't been more or less breaking down in front of a panel of 7 people - not one of Melissa's finer moments.  You might also note that I am not currently in grad school.

My answer was in Hebrew - K'she ba Roma, osim k'mo Romania.  When in Rome, do as the Romanians do.