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Sounds like a really bad idea to me.
by anatoly 17y ago
Sounds like a really bad idea to me.
- chronomex 17y agoI can see it now. "Behind one of these doors is a job offer with your name on it! The other two go to janitorial supplies, and the networking closet. You just might get lucky!"
- nazgulnarsil 17y agowhy? for a job that involves work with probability modelling it would certainly be relevant.
- Tichy 17y agoNot very fair, though, if even maths professors get it wrong. On the other hand at this point it seems everybody should have heard about it already, so it might work as a test for curiousness.
- anatoly 17y ago1. It's notorious for clashing with many people's intuitions and being very confusing. Many smart people who are experts in probability theory answer it incorrectly at first and then it takes them a while to convince themselves they were wrong. 2. On the other hand, if you read about it and understood it once, it's trivial, and you can give a correct answer confidently while still being very bad at probability in general. So you'd be selecting for knowing a piece of trivia rather than any real knowledge or experience. 3. Interviewers are not flawless mechanisms, they're people. They have biases that are different to control for even when they're aware of them. You want to steer clear of questions which a) make it easy for the interviewer to feel smugly superior to the candidate; b) the answer to which looks very easy and natural once you know it well, and it's difficult to remember how non-intuitive it had been before. This question fails badly on both counts.
- Maro 17y agoIn an interview scenario, I'd give the problem and the correct solution, and just ask the interviewee to tell me 'why?'.
- nazgulnarsil 17y agothanks for the detailed response, seems very reasonable.