Today I was asked in an interview, " how many golf balls can fit into a school bus...

Today I was asked in an interview, " how many golf balls can fit into a school bus?" I asked him why is he asking me this. He just said it's part of the interview. I told him probably at least 20,000. I feel like I failed it. What should I have said?

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Interview math problem? Lol I heard some Jobs ask math problems. Did ask if there was any more information?

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_problem

you were supposed to work out an order-of-magnitude informed guess, using math

that's what I figured but I don't even know the dimensions of a golf ball out a school bus. How am i suppose to come up with an estimate without this information?

use your imagination to imagine how many golf balls fit in a seat
then how many seats on a bus
then how many more seats could be placed on the remaining empty space

That's the most autistic interview ever, unless you know the dimensions, what's the fucking point? Ask him how many dicks he can fit in his mouth on a guessed and unknown volume of cock meat.

A golf ball is maybe 1 1/2" diameter, so a 15" cube is already 1000. Weight aside, you could easilly carry that size of a box. Your 20k guess is way short.

>PhD at Harvard applying for job
>Interviewer asks dumb OP's question

Applicant leaves interview

>Dumb millennials. Why can't we find any good candidates?

Boomer logic.

400,000
rough est

>Ask him how many dicks he can fit in his mouth on a guessed and unknown volume of cock meat.

I guess it's just a psychology test to valuate your attitude and problem solving abilities. I think you should have asked him more information, rather than jumping straight to a conclusion.

This.

sorry jamal but it's the kind of thing asked in interviews for anything harder than flipping a burger

You should have countered with "That would depend on the size of the bus wouldn't it?"

Is it a retard bus or a regular one?

A bus full

I've done this once. This stupid fucking HR bitch who was sitting in literally asked me what kind of animal I would be. I straight up told them that I don't want to work there because of that question and walked out.

>I straight up told them that I don't want to work there because of that question and walked out.
If that actually happened, good ya m80. You're doing the Lord's work.

McDonalds will be better off without you cleaning their toilets. You sure showed' them.

boot-licking wage slave detected!

>what kind of animal I would be
a gnu

Sorry buddy-friend-pal-pajeet, I'm an EE and CE dual major, lightyears ahead of a CS monkey, and our shit isn't half and vague and autistic. OPs interview reminds me of a freshman philosophy major trying to punch above his weight by getting stoned as fuck and trying to be deep.

you were an entire OOM off

That's the sort of smartass answer that everyone hates, especially people who are looking to be impressed.

Bus is approximately 2.5 x 3 x 10m. Maybe 1/4 is filled with seats and shit so about 55m^3

A gold ball is about 4cm wide, so 4/3 * pi * 0.02^3 is around 0.08^3 = 0.0005 m^3 so 2000 per cubic meter, but a bit less because there will be space so let's say 1700.

55 * 1700 = around 100k balls.

I should think a PhD from Harvard could at least do a bit of basic maths? I know they probably think it's beneath them, but it's certainly not a hard problem.

If they don't want a smartass answer, then they shouldn't ask me stupid questions. If they're going to ask me retarded questions like that, I'm better off looking for work elsewhere; if they actually give me the job after I give a smartass reply, then maybe they're worth checking out.

a school bus can be of any size, it's an intentionally ambiguous question. they're interested in seeing your reasoning skills

Sounds like the perfect answer for a stupid ass question.
If they want to test someone's ability to apply arithmetic to spacial based queries then there are better ways to do it for God's sake.

Just keep a jar of jelly beans on the desk and ask how many are in there, it's fucking simple.

Just ask them for the dimensions. That's what they expect you to do...

You could have at least looked it up before giving such a laughable estimate.

The average person does not know the volume of a golf ball or the dimensions of a bus without looking it up.

what's it like having autism?

Not OP, but I came up with about 20K, given a bus dimension of 40' x 12' x 8', with the golf ball size of 1.68", and giving 30% of the volumetric space for seats and such.

But I'm not a math person, so I may be way off.

If you seriously think that being able to estimate an answer for anything off the cuff is stupid, you don't deserve the job.

Good question, you'd have to be autistic to answer the original question faggot.

Giving an estimate without any fucking information supplied is something only fucking salesmen do, and it's why everyone hates salesmen. Anyone who actually gives a shit, would go and get some numbers before pulling an estimate out of their ass.

This OP.

Assume golf ball to be 4 x 4 x 4 cm cube.
Assume bus to be 200 x 200 x 1000 cm cuboid.
Hopefully the overestimation of the volume of a golf ball will be cancelled out by some of the assumptions made about the bus.
40,000,000/64 = ~600,000 golf balls, which is about the answer you'll find on Google.

>You're autistic if you don't answer stupid questions seriously

... Actually asking about the size of the bus is taking it seriously because you're actually trying to get an understanding.

Hell, if I was a boss and I asked that question I'd WANT that answer, because then you know you've got a potential employee who actually gives a shit to use some level of critical thinking. Not just throwing an answer out and hoping for the best. "Hoping for the best" is a terrible business strategy.

We don't use centimeters here nigger.
You wouldn't get the job.

The unit of measure doesn't matter in the results you idiot.

It takes about 3 nanoseconds to look up the information in any actual situation, but I doubt the interviewer gave them that privilege.

That's why I literally took guesses instead of looking it up.

I know a school bus is at least twice as long as a car so 10m sounds good. It's about the same width so 2.5m. It's taller than a person by at least a couple of feet so 3m. I've seen a golf ball in real life so I can make a rough guess at 4cm across. From there it's just estimates.

And btw I think it's a pretty good estimate, school busses are pretty small, and a very big portion is used up. YMMV but that's the point of the game, to make an estimation

You fucked that up pretty bad with
4 * 0.02^3 = 0.08^3
but at least you have the idea

How many interviewers can you fit into a school bus?

If you're too stupid to make a reasonable estimate from limited data then why are you applying to this sort of job? Having a good order of magnitude estimate is very useful. Anyone who has studied engineering/science knows this.

Your fired

>manlet answer
20,000 balls meeeh
>I fuck chicks working on HR on a daily basis
as many as I can put inside with my 9 iron.

not technology

But the point is that you're supposed to give a good estimate, or else you fail the question. That's what makes it stupid for an interview, it's pointless.

Looking it up says ~600k.

He never even said what kind of job he was applying for.

you fucked up when you decided to calculate the ball's volume as a sphere instead of a cube

He was incorrect, but he was not wrong.
He was aiming for the right spot, with errors along the way. Which is far superior to aiming for the wrong spot.
This is a differentiation that would matter.

the point of the question is for them to asses your reasoning skills. they don't care about the specifics of the answer or your interpretation of a school bus' size. as long as your reasoning checks out and the math is correct you will pass

how you can you people be so autistic

You could say that for literally any answer.

It's not that hard to do when you already have a job that you like when going to the interview. If they can't offer a better environment then you walk. Idiotic HR questions is one of the things that makes me leave instantly whenever I'm in an interview where I don't need the job desperately.

>there are people on Sup Forums too autistic to answer already autistic Fermi's problem

What other reasoning could you use besides volumetric differences between the bus and a golf ball? Anyone that seriously answers this question would follow the same logic.

Wow I didn't know they asked these sorts of questions in higher up positions.

How do you prepare for a question like that?

How do you even answer it if you didn't have knowledge of size and dimensions of a golfball and buss?

You ask questions about the bus you goof. They don't want someone that just randomly guesses but works to an answer

you ask them for the dimensions
if they don't' answer then you come up with something "reasonable" and work from there. jesus it's really not that difficult

I'd use variables, like X and Y and whatever.
Then fill in the resulting equation with guesses for the variables at the end to get a numerical result.
Or ask for dimensions, which they probably wouldn't provide, the fuckers.

The golfballs in a bus Fermi is not super autistic. I once got asked to calculate how many crossbeams are there on the railroads of the state where the job I was applying to. That was after they had flown me in from an another country and very well knew I didn't have any idea about the railway network of that state. When questioned they didn't give any numbers on to how much railroads there are in the state. Threw out an answer based on a pure guess and managed to hit the correct order of magnitude.

You're aiming wrong if you just give an answer without explanation or thought.
Like you are right now.

I haven't given an answer.

A response is an answer. Don't be pedantic, it's something else people hate.

All they wanted you to do is go
"Hmm well assuming a bus of volume x and a goalball of volume y that'd be like z thousand"
They wanted the calculation you would do, not that the numbers are right. Because if you wanted good numbers you'd look it up.

Now I don't know what you're talking about.

>You could say that for literally any answer.
I'm saying that this is a bad response.
What are you having trouble with?

>asked him why is he asking me this
how old are you? have you honestly never heard of these kinds of questions?
>he just said it's part of the interview
this was retarded of him, but given the stratospherically autistic question you gave him i'm not surprised he floundered. he should have said that the question is just an arbitrary brain teaser to tease out how you think about problems when you haven't had time to prepare.
>i told him probably at least 20,000. I feel like I failed it
if that's all you told him, you definitely failed it.

your standard brain teaser answer should take the following structure
>person poses the question
>"okay, i think [insert assumptions about the problem here]. do you think those assumptions are reasonable or am i way off base?"
(these assumptions should be premises like the amount of space a golf ball takes and the rough size of the bus. if you have no notion of golf and don't know the size of a golf ball, that shouldn't eliminate you from the interview, and this is where that pitfall gets fixed)
>"okay, so given those details and accounting for the chairs and all that other stuff in the bus - and i'm assuming we're not filling a bus full of passengers - i think that works out to N golf balls"

that's about it. the correct answer isn't the point. there's too much random esoteric shit going on to answer that question seriously. the whole point is to see how you chip away at a problem. people that don't explain their thought process tend to be perceived as unreliable because their reasoning is more of a black box. if your code and logic is described as "black box", then nobody can work with you.

Have you literally never seen a golf ball or a bus before?

see and also unless you're interviewing at a company that manufactures golf balls, nobody's going to expect you to know the rough size of one. the fact that you need to ask us these questions is probably an indication that you wouldn't do well in an interview, though.

most people are intelligent enough to work in a team on code. i know a lot of you autists want to believe that you're saving lives or something, but a lot of coding is implementing logic, and you can get someone caught up with that. the real dangers are
1) whether the person is capable of identifying when they need to ask for help, and
2) whether the person takes the right mental routes to get to an answer.

if your brain is so fucking addled that you take these insane, circuitous paths to solve problems, fail to communicate the logic or reasoning behind your code (either in comments or anywhere), and don't communicate well with your team, then you become a huge cost on the company hiring you

>this was retarded of him, but given the stratospherically autistic question you gave him i'm not surprised he floundered. he should have said that the question is just an arbitrary brain teaser to tease out how you think about problems when you haven't had time to prepare.
I disagree, from the interviewer's perspective, he probably gained more information about OP from the response he got than he would have if he'd babied him through it.

that's probably true. like if someone walked into an interview and just told me straight up that he was autistic and all of his past colleagues felt he was socially abrasive i would be like "okay thanks for dropping by"

and companies wonder why they can't find candidates for the job

it's like they don't want you to make money for them

fuck hr, fuck ats, and fuck modern credential bullshit

"Is it a short bus?"

Goddamn you fucking people want everything spoon fed to you. You thought you'd get your degree without much effort, waltz in and get a 90k a yr job plus benefits no problem.

"it's whichever bus you rode growing up"

t. bootcamp graduate

Interviewer probably figured that OP must have ridden the short bus to school.

you should have just said something like, assuming each golf ball occupies 2cm^3, and assuming the bus to have a volume of 10m^3, then it would hold 10m^3 divided by 2cm^3

this

this sounds like an austism test. You failed it. I would too.

>Sup Forums gets all upset and confused when people ask them to show their problem-solving process instead of their '2+2=4 i am mommy's clever boy' skills
unsurprising

just say 'dunno'

it was a test for your butthurt autism

That's just an indication that the company was some shitty hipster startup. You should have just walked out then and there. I did that multiple times while looking for an internship. Legitimate companies don't ask these types of stupid questions,

Estimate. This is not about the perfect answer but about the order of magnitude. You should not be off by a factor of 1/100 or 100.

The average person does not (claim to) have a PhD from Harvard.

This isn't about knowing the dimensions of a golf ball, or a bus. It's not even about being right.

This is about showing you can think reasonably to work out a problem.

Same thing with FizzBuzz: it's not there to show you can program, but that you can think programmatically.

In Poland, correct answer would be: "As much as my dear company president require!". At least according to the "guides" for students and such, about searching for job or writing CV. For some reasons, such guides outright suggest absurds like writing, in "Hobby" section, "my hobby is riding a bike, which teach me about values of frendship and teamwork, as well as responsibility of being part of the team".

For some reason, I feel like this is supposed to take opposite effect.

>all these triehards pretending they would have come up with a well calculated rational answer on the spot

It's easy to think you would from behind your keyboard, it's much harder when you're under stress of a job interview and getting a question you did not expect

None.

The doors are closed.

It's gotta be at least 10 golf balls, right?

My guess is 11 golf balls.

This is fucking hilarious

HR is cancer.
youtube.com/watch?v=ZMqNbgZnNLo

Top zozzle

top kek what kind of shit place would ask you something like that?

Big Bill Balderschweiz's Haus of Golf und Bus Transport, duh.

>be given an interview question clearly made just to see how the candidate thinks and reasons about a problem, i.e. the thing he'll have to do in a job
>be unable to even try
>don't get the job
>blame the boomers
Millennial logic. Keep being a NEET ;)

>hurr durr how 2 divide volume by volume
>requiring thinking and reasoning
Not a NEET. I'm happy with my six figure job, and they didn't ask useless questions like this in the interview.