HITEQUEST
technical interview Q & A for high-tech professionals
 
 
Interview Questions
Electronics Hardware
Computer Software
General questions
Brain teasers

Resources
Resume and interview
How to get a job in Silicon Valley
How much are you worth on market?
Do you need an agent?

Break time stories
Tomato company

About Hitequest
About Hitequest
Join us
Home page

 
 
 
 
 
 
   

 
 =Break time stories= 

     
   

 
Written exam


  A company was hiring new staff. One question in the written exam was:
 
You are driving your car in a wild stormy night. You pass by a bus station, and you see three people waiting for the bus: an old lady who looks as if she is about to die. A doctor who had once saved your life. A man/woman you have been dreaming to be with. You can only take one passenger in your car. Which one will you choose? Please explain your answer.
 
Think about it before you continue reading. This must be some kind of personality test. Every answer has its reasoning.
You could pick up the old lady. She is going to die, and thus you should save her first.
You could take the doctor, because he once saved your life. This will be the perfect chance to pay him back.
However, you could always pay the doctor back in the future, but you may never be able to find the perfect lover once you pass this chance.

There was one candidate who was eventually hired (out of over 20 applicants).
WHAT DID HE SAY?
 
 
He simply answered: "Give the car key to the doctor. Let him take the old lady to the hospital. I will stay and wait for the bus with the man/woman of my dreams."
Sometimes, we would gain more if we were able to give up our stubborn limitations.

 

 
 
 

Tomato company

An unemployed man is desperate to support his family of a wife and three kids. He applies for a janitor's job at a large firm and easily passes an aptitude test. The human resources manager tells him: "You will be hired at minimum wage of $8 an hour. Let me have your e-mail address so that we can get you in the loop. Our system will automatically e-mail you all the forms and advise you when to start and where to report on your first day." Taken back, the man protests that he is poor and has neither a computer nor an e-mail address. To this the manager replies: "You must understand that to a company like ours that means that you virtually do not exist. Without an e-mail address you can hardly expect to be employed by a high-tech firm. Good day." Stunned, the man leaves. Not knowing where to turn and having $10 in his wallet, he walks past a farmers' market and sees a stand selling 25 lb. crates of beautiful red tomatoes. He buys a crate, carries it to a busy corner and displays the tomatoes. In less than 2 hours he sells all the tomatoes and makes 100% profit. Repeating the process several times more that day, he ends up with almost $100 and arrives home that night with several bags of groceries for his family. During the night he decides to repeat the tomato business the next day. By the end of the week he is getting up early every day and working into the night. He multiplies his profits quickly. Early in the second week he acquires a cart to transport several boxes of tomatoes at a time, but before a month is up he sells the cart to buy a broken-down pickup truck. At the end of a year he owns three old trucks. His two sons have left their neighborhood gangs to help him with the tomato business, his wife is buying the tomatoes, and his daughter is taking night courses at the community college so she can keep books for him. By the end of the second year he has a dozen very nice used trucks and employs fifteen previously unemployed people, all selling tomatoes. He continues to work hard. Time passes and at the end of the fifth year he owns a fleet of nice trucks and a warehouse that his wife supervises, plus two tomato farms that the boys manage. The tomato company's payroll has put hundreds of homeless and jobless people to work. His daughter reports that the business grossed over one million dollars. Planning for the future, he decides to buy some life insurance. Consulting with an insurance adviser, he picks an insurance plan to fit his new circumstances. Then the adviser asks him for his e-mail. When the man replies that he doesn't have time to mess with a computer and has no e-mail address, the insurance man is stunned: "What, you don't have e-mail? No computer? No Internet? Just think where you would be today if you'd had all of that five years ago!" "Ha!" snorts the man. "If I'd had e-mail five years ago I would be sweeping floors making $8 an hour." Which brings us to the moral of the story:
Sadly, since I got this story by e-mail, I am probably closer to being a janitor than a millionaire.
 
 

Cup of coffee

 
A group of alumni, highly established in their careers, got together to visit their old university professor.
Conversation soon turned into complaints about stress in work and life.
Offering his guests coffee, the professor went to the kitchen and returned with a large pot of coffee and an assortment of cups - porcelain, plastic, glass, crystal, some plain looking, some expensive, some exquisite - telling them to help themselves to the coffee.
When all the students had a cup of coffee in hand, the professor said, "If you noticed, all the nice looking expensive cups were taken up, leaving behind the plain and cheap ones. While it is normal for you to want only the best for yourselves, that is the source of your problems and stress.
Be assured that the cup itself adds no quality to the coffee. In most cases it is just more expensive and in some cases even hides what we drink. What all of you really wanted was coffee, not the cup, but you consciously went for the best cups... And then you began eyeing each other's cups. Now consider this: Life is the coffee; the jobs, money and position in society are the cups. They are just tools to hold and contain Life, and the type of cup we have does not define, nor change the quality of Life we live.
Sometimes, by concentrating only on the cup, we fail to enjoy the coffee.
 
Author unknown
 
 

 
Murphy's Laws :

 
  • If everything seems to be going well with your project, you have obviously overlooked something.
  • Logic is a systematic method of coming to the wrong conclusion with confidence.
  • An expert is one who knows more and more about less and less until he knows absolutely everything about nothing.
  • .Tell a man there are 300 billion stars in the universe and he'll believe you. Tell him a bench has wet paint on it and he'll have to touch to be sure.
  • All great discoveries are made by mistake.
  • Nothing ever gets built on schedule or within budget.
  • A meeting is an event at which the minutes are kept and the hours are lost.
  • A failure will not appear till a unit has passed final inspection.
  • Some people manage by the book, even though they don't know who wrote the book or even what book.
  • The primary function of the design engineer is to make things difficult for the fabricator and impossible for the serviceman.
  • To spot the expert, pick the one who predicts the job will take the longest and cost the most.
  • After all is said and done, a hell of a lot more is said than done.
  • Any circuit design must contain at least one part which is obsolete, two parts which are unobtainable and three parts which are still under development.
  • Theory is when you think you know something but it doesn't work.
    Practice is when something works but you don't know why.
    Usually we combine theory and practice: nothing works and we don't know why.