“Would you be able to get through an Apple job interview?” Adam Boult asks for The Telegraph.
“People who’ve applied for jobs with the firm – successfully and unsuccessfully – have been sharing some of the questions they were asked during their interviews on the website Glassdoor,” Boult writes. “Here’s a selection of them – how would you cope with being asked these?”
• “Who would you most like to share a coffee with and why?”
• “How would you describe yourself?”
• “Tell me about a time when you got something you didn’t think you deserved.”
• “You have a 100 coins laying flat on a table, each with a head side and a tail side. 10 of them are heads up, 90 are tails up. You can’t feel, see or in any other way find out which side is up. Split the coins into two piles such that there are the same number of heads in each pile.”
Twenty-one more questions in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Good luck!
Split the pile in half, then put all coins on their sides. Therefore you will the same number on each pile = 0
1. My Dad. He’s gone.
2. Children have row models. Once you grow up, you’re the example.
3. Yes. Fish fingers and custard…
4. Underutilized
5. You already know. You do it.
6. Why?
7. Cannot remember that happening.
8. Who cares about other peoples opinion of their music? Not Me.
9. Don’t drop the egg. It’s going to break from any height over a couple of feet. (Hey, I took care of 80 chickens when I was a kid)
10. First day of a class in high school (9th g). Everyone came in and sat down. There was a long paragraph of stuff written on the board. Mr. Brixby came in and erased the chalk board. Then he ask everyone to write down what they could remember of what ever it was from the board. Most had next to nothing. I was the person that had it all. Everyone looked at me with a funny look. I thought, I’m not going to show you THAT again… 😉
There’s several answers. One would be to just divide the pile … the requirement was merely same number of heads, not same number of heads up.
Or if “same number heads up” was the intent, cut each coin in half and make two piles from the halves.
Etc.
😄✌️
😘
I know your id pic is Venus..
If you are a girl will u marry me? 😉 🙂
No, split the coins into two piles randomly so that there are now fifty coins in each pile. Flip 25 of the coins over in each pile.
Well no wonder nothing is getting done. What a pile of new age sewage.
It’s a job, not an Ivy League professor position. No wonder Apple is in trouble. Half the kids applying wouldn’t even know what a turntable is. Gawd.
“an Ivy League professor position” They are a bigger problem than they are an asset.
Funny, just watched a couple of episodes of Mike Rowe’s Dirty Jobs.
Interesting; the thought came to me: Who would I rather be around on a daily basis, and who would I call on if the s–t hit the fan?
EASY call. And the same goes for the kids who don’t know what a turntable is.
Not in my company, your not!
Both, if you get my meaning. I have two degrees and the only thing of any lasting value is my PhD in School of Hard Knocks and Life Experience.
NOT – Dummy…
“If ‘you can’t feel, see or in any other way find out which side is up’ then how do you know 10 of the coins are heads up? Ha! I’ve run rings around you logically, Mr. Apple-Interviewer-Guy!”
I know what they are getting at but it needs to be worded better.
That question, and a few others, probe to find if the person is an independent thinker, a leader or a follower. The questions clearly indicate that they’re looking for followers/sheeple. For some jobs that might be useful. But for employees in general, I find that disappointing.
Perhaps how you respond to the question vs. the “correct” answer is what the interviewer is looking for.
Criticizing the question, with an attitude that you are more intelligent than the person interviewing you probably won’t get you too far.
Then you can go home and complain that they’re all a bunch of idiots and the questions were stupid, while you continue looking for your next job.
“while you continue looking for your next job” which, given the questions, would seem like the better idea.
Agree, Derek Currie, great questions if you are one of the sheeple followers. They will not serve us well in just about all parts of society.
What you say has merit, but if you used the same tone as you have written here, then you would not be offered a job at our company. Condescending attitude goes both ways and Apple is becoming the industry gorilla that old time Apple users used to detest. Just because Apple currently makes a lot of money doesn’t make their average employee smarter or better. Without Jobs’ app store, all the current stuck up Apple employees would still be working at their former employer, Microsoft.
READ THE QUESTION CAREFULLY:
“Split the coins into two piles such that there are the same number of heads in each pile.”
It didn’t say that any of the heads HAD to be FACE UP
Sounds like the perfect reasoning for Apple excuses. Battery life problems? Get rid of the indicator. Poof no problem. OMG! YOU’RE OUR GUY!
How sad that it’s true.
Sounds like my local US Post Office. They had 4 registers but only 1 or 2 would be operational and despite heavy traffic they wouldn’t staff the other two to handle the congestion even though there was plenty of people idling walking by. Customers would complain about the long wait in line and could tell because there was a big ole clock. You know, the kind they had in your schools many years back… BIG! BIG CLOCK!!! So, what did the government agency known as the US Post Office do? They took down that big clock in the lobby. Problem solved! And if you really wanted to complain to someone. They would give you a phone number that no one ever answered. It’s the little things like this that allowed an outsider with no political experience win it all!
omfg, enough. He won, she lost, you fking crybabies. Stop dragging all topics down to butthurt whining about Tump level. Ffffffffffuu
Split the coins into two piles such that there are the same number of heads in each pile
50 in each pile. They all have a heads side.
After 25 questions, they surely would ask if I had any. Here’s my first.
“Is it mandatory to be a douchebag to work here?”
It’s too bad that some have to be douchebag, and are here.
Don’t be so hard! You didn’t give me that impression. 🙂
Heh heh! I’m not sure ‘douchebag’ is the best summary word for their desired employee. But it’s good enough, considering some of these questions! 😉
You’re right. It needs the “Brown Nose” modifier….
Sycophant is reserved for when you pass your probationary period.
The only one that got me stumped is #17. I have no idea how many children are born every day. I have no idea how to give a witty response to this either. I don’t really have a creative answer to how to test a toaster either, but at least I have SOMETHING.
Answer to #5 is to label each box “fruit”, by the way.
By the way, the article mentions 25 questions but lists 23, so I guess the remaining two are “why does this article mention 25 questions but there are only 23?” and “is there any other question we forgot to ask”.
No child is born every day. Each child is only born once.
That’s not necessarily true. After the hand of God prevented me from dying in this life, an angel revealed to me a couple of my past lives. She showed me how I died in those “lives”: Paris in the early part of the 20th century my wife shot me in the head after she discovered I cheated on her, and in Vietnam during the late ’60’s. I was retrieving munitions from a dump and an enemy rocket, grenade, etc. obliterated me. So, a child is born more than once.
Ding ding ding! You’re hired! Please accept the position of Specialist any of our San Francisco stores.
Gotta love the ambiguity of language.
Question 24: Did you notice there are only 23 questions?
Question 25: What question would you like to answer that I didn’t ask?
As was pointed out above, an interview is about both employer AND employee asking questions. So the final question from the employer should be ‘What questions would you like to ask ME?’
And the sign said “Long-haired freaky people need not apply”
So I tucked my hair up under my hat and I went in to ask him why
He said “You look like a fine upstanding young man, I think you’ll do”
So I took off my hat, I said “Imagine that. Huh! Me workin’ for you!”
Whoa-oh-oh
-From “Signs” 5 Man Electrical Band reprised by Tesla
By the time ye get my age, ye’d better not nary stinking job. If you do, it’s too wet to plow.
Should only be two questions-
1) What can you do to make Apple a better company?
2) What can Apple do to make you a better employee?
(in that order, BTW, with the first question 75% of importance…)
All that for $12 an hour? I think not…
Sorry, but this is rank bullshit. There is no such list of Apple interview questions. As an Apple manager I interviewed a couple dozen candidates and never did we have a list of suggested interview questions or any crap like this. Come on MDN, you can dig up better tripe than this.
Google used to ask these asinine questions in interviews, but they discontinued the practice after their internal investigations showed the practice was pointless.
At Syracuse, NY Apple Store Apple Store Employees Look Like they Live In A Dumpster… Dirty Clothes and Faded, dirty wrinkled Apple Shirts, 4-5 Nose & Face Piercings, Tattoos galore, Multicolored hair on women, men with knarly beards and unkept long hair.. And when asking questions .. not the 25 here.. I saw the Blank Stare… I was disgusted and went to purchase my Apple product from Best Buy.
Do you get points for pointing out it should be “lying” not “laying”?
Actually it is “laying”. The coins are inanimate object. Inanimate objects lay, and thus the coins are laying on the table. Animate objects (like people) lie, and thus a person would be lying on a bed. (There are the exceptions of egg layers. They both lie and lay. 🙂 )
It is the same as dragged/drug and hanged/hung. A person is dragged a rock is drug. A person is hanged. A picture is hung.
So much for our daily English lesson, which we all should have learned back in third or fourth grade.
Therefore, you get no points. Yet, since the vast majority of the U.S. population does not know the proper use of these words either, you don’t get any points deducted.
Then there is the question most on any interviewees mind:
What is the most arcane, useless and idiotic question ever asked by an HR rep in the history of humanity?
The nominations would make a long list.
The only thing more worthless than an “HR Professional” are a pair of “HR Professionals”.
I once was asked by a temporary employment agency contracted by my company if I was happy with my “product”. I got their ass fired by lunch time.
Here’s what I would do for the coin question:
make a pile of 10 and a pile of 90 then flip all coins in the pile of 10.
there are 10 possibilities for the number of heads in the pile of 10 (T) and the pile of 90(N), and all of them give the flipped pile of 10, T’ equal to the pile of 90
T=0, N=10 –> T’=10, N=10
T=1, N=9 –> T’=9, N=9
…
T=10, N=0 –> T’=0, N=0