My Favorite Interview Question

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I have had the (often) enlightening experience of being one of the primary interviewers at a growing firm, and have had the chance to interview dozens of (often) interesting, bright people.

The question I’m probably most known for is a variation on the classic ‘walk me through your thought process for estimating a very large number’ genre of interview question. I won’t go into the details, but as a brief aside, it is shocking to me how many people are complete unaware that this is a genre of question. If your follow-up question is asking me about why I would ever ask such a question, you clearly didn’t do much research on interview questions.

Anyway — most people, in the course of answering my thought process question, start with the population of the world. It would shock you how many people have no idea how many zeroes worth of other people share the planet with them. Over time, I figured out that I think knowing how many other souls are on this little rock we call home is a better indicator to me of the general intelligence (or whatever it is I’m looking for) than even my beloved question.

I’m not sure why that’s the case, it’s a fairly trivial fact that everybody learns at some point in their life, and can probably be searched by speaking at your watch, but somehow it is deeply important. If you don’t know how many people are on the Earth, how can you discuss ‘the bottom billion’? How can you put anything in context? I think this is just one of those facts that people who are great co-workers walk around with.

Frankly, as long as someone knows it’s between 1-10 billion, I’m not sweating it. They are nervous, it’s been a long day, whatever. But when someone can get within a billion or so of the actual population, it stands out to me more than I ever thought it would.

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