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Swordsman422

Strange interview question

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So, my father recently found himself unemployed, and in the search for a new job he had an interview today. Most of the questions were typical, then the interviewer asked him this.

 

"If you were to come into my office and I pulled out a revolver, put three bullets into it, spun the cylinder, pointed it at you and pulled the trigger and it did not go off, would you rather I pulled the trigger again or spun the cylinder again first?"

 

Dad, being an engineer, said he would rather have the cylinder spun again, thus giving him extra time to escape. This apparently impressed the recruiter.

 

I mean, I knew the job market was tough, but shoot... whoa, bad pun.

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when an interviewer asks you about pulling out a revolver... it's time to get up and walk away :grin:

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I told him that the world of airsoft is more and more havoc with people...

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When an interviewer points a revolver at you, it's probable that your cover is f**ked up and your infiltration mission has failed. Time to think about your cyanide capsule.

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It's still better than John Cleese conducting the interview.

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This world is so full of s**t!

I would have just walked out there and leave him with his strange questions!

 

My best regards, Kodiak.

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The probability of the gun going off, conditional on it not firing on the 1st pull is 3/5. If you spin it the probability is back to 1/2. This assumes you don't know where in the revolver the bullets are placed (random pattern). Tell him to spin it again and run like the wind.

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when an interviewer asks you about pulling out a revolver... it's time to get up and walk away :grin:

 

 

 

Ain't that the truth! Talk about a hostile work environment... The interviewer must not know ANYTHING about guns... Even joking about pointing a gun at someone is in poor taste at best, downright rude and will probably result in this guy getting his rear kicked but good...

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Engineers get asked oddball questions like this all the time, this one is clearly a matter of weighing up the probability and certainty of the different outcomes. Usually it is a case of the path you take to get to an answer, as opposed to the actual answer you end up at. For example, I recently got asked how many marbles could you fit in tube station.

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There are civil and polite ways to phrase probablility questions...

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Can't be all bad. They want to take him to the next level in candidate path, so he's not complaining. I've just never gotten a query this interesting during a job interview.

 

@ Jimbib: marbles in a tube station?

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Yeah, so they were looking for how many standard sized marbles (~1.25cm diameter) you could fit into an average British tube station. The idea is that you start by working out the volume of a single marble, and then you work out the cross sectional area of the tube station.

 

Then you start to consider things like the overall volume of the station and the fact that in regular sphere packing you have 74% space efficiency. They're not looking for a final answer, in fact you often get stopped way before you reach an answer. It's all about the methodical steps you take in figuring out the problem.

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He could have drawn his own gun and say "Option Three, bang you are dead!"

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My answer is I would use a Jedi Mind Trick to make him point the gun at himself while he THOUGHT it was pointed at me.

 

That or I drop my pants and as he averts his eyes to avoid seeing my lightsaber I run.

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Imagine the interviewer really pulls out a revolver, puts three bullets into it, spuns the cylinder, points it at the job-seeker's face and pulls the trigger. It does not go off, and the interviewer asks: "Would you rather I pull the trigger again or spun the cylinder again first?"

Strangely enough, the job-seeker just quietly replies: "And what if a bullet had really been shot and had repainted the wall behind me?"

The interviewer answers with an equal composure: "Well, er... Let's just say I didn't have to ask both of your predecessors... No please, don't look at the wall behind you. Don't."

Edited by Capitaine Vengeur

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He would of got to about the spin the cycliner part before I took the gun from his hand and shoved it up his ass. :rofl::lol:

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My answer is I would use a Jedi Mind Trick to make him point the gun at himself while he THOUGHT it was pointed at me.

 

That or I drop my pants and as he averts his eyes to avoid seeing my lightsaber I run.

 

 

Hmmm... Jumping off the cliff is a good idea. Get to the ground faster!

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