Post:
You have three switches in one room and a single light bulb in another room. You are allowed to visit the room with the light bulb only once. How do you figure out which switch controls the bulb? Write your answer in the comments before looking at other answers.
Comment:
If this were an interview question, the correct response would be "Do you have any relevant questions for me? Because have a long list of things that more deserving of my precious time than to think about this!
I think they’re stupid too. Going into an interview is already stressful enough and these types of questions don’t put me into “problem solving” mode. They put me into “brain teaser” mode which is a different type of thinking for me. You know how we nailed these questions when I was in uni? We traded them after our interviews between each other and you just had to pretend you’ve never heard it before. So the main thing people were testing was whether or not the question had made it to them.
For programming, there are so many better ways to test out of the box thinking to me … I think the “what happens when you press a letter into a web browser address bar” or something is better and at least relevant. One that I like is, “there’s an outage in production, how would you go about diagnosing it?” Then as an interviewer I’d reshape the scenario and see where they put their focus and where they give up.