Brainteasers still relevant?
Are brainteasers still common in IB interviews today? And how much do they matter in terms of getting an offer?
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No problem. Say you have an infinite number of socks, but only two types in this drawer- Sock type A and Sock type B. If you randomly select two pairs of socks, you might end up with 2 Type As (A | A) or 2 Type Bs (B | B) OR you could wind up with 1 Type A and 1 Type B (A | B). Without turning on the lights to see, you have no way of knowing what combination of socks you pulled out. However, when you pull the third sock out it doesn't matter, because you're guaranteed to have a pair of socks.
The following combinations are available for three pairs of randomly selected socks:
(A | A | A) or (A | A | B) or (A | B | A) or (A | B | B) or (B | B | A) or (B | B | B) or (B | A | B) or (B | A | A)
Therefore, you are guaranteed to have a matching sock after three sock pulls!
I always ask 1 of 2 brain teasers I have on hand. Not because I care about you eating the right answer, but it’s a good way to see how people think. If you do really well on all the technicals but not the brain teaser, things aren’t going to change much and it won’t be a ding. But if you did ok on the technicals and crush the brain teaser (and clearly not because you just knew the answer already), that might be enough to get you over the edge.
I have two go to questions: 1. How many hours a day do you have to work, in order to work 100 hours a week? 2. If you get to the office at 9:00 am, and you work 14 hours, what time do you leave the office
I've had a few people opt out, realising that they don't want to do this, which is great, because it's saved us both some time. Also, I've seen people that really don't think, some of my favourite responses are: - "You need to work 20 hours a day" okay, I guess if you really want the weekend off - Girl who thought that 15 hours was 9:00 am - 9:00 pm - Guy who legitimately spent three agonising minutes dividing 100 by 7 (I said we could move on but he insisted that he could do the math in his head) - Kid who said - yeah, but no one actually works until midnight every day, that's just a story they tell you to scare interns
We don't have much turnover here but I did get to interview someone recently and made a point to get at least one of these types of questions in. Sometimes these types of questions would rattle my cage when I was active in my job search, so I think its good to get at least one in to see how the person thinks and reacts under pressure.
I got this question from Bridgewater but I used it in the interview and have adopted it as my default brain teaser for future interviews. Just about everyone in my office got this question wrong when I asked it as well. Anyways, the question is:
You're on a raft in the middle of the ocean, you're allowed one item, what is it?
The wrong answer is just to say some random item or the first item that pops into your head. The correct answer is to start blasting off questions. In the original question you have absolutely no context to answer it, just as if I were to ask you to put a price target on some company you've never heard of. So what you want to hear is the person start asking things like how did I get there? Where am I geographically? What time of year is it? Am I alone?... Eventually asking enough questions to reasonably form a more educated answer. I think it's a good one to ask for a research type role. The kid we interviewed only asked one question, but that was better than most people in my office, we hired him.