Just wondering how many of you have "bombed" the interview process because you were asked to take a technical skills test that is multiple choice, where many questions do NOT have a correct answer - or worse, had questions with more than one right answer?

Someone I know was given a test that included the question:
"What is the next in this sequence: 1, 2, 3, ...?" (If sequence is "add 1 to previous number", then "4"; if sequence is "add prior 2 numbers", then "5")

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And the question "what does the .Net garbage collector do" had as one of the answers "to make sure you always have enough memory", which is, obviously, dead wrong, yet it was the least wrong answer - unless they wanted that other answer because the "senior" programmer who wrote the test didn't actually know the right answer.

Is it a Kobiashi Maru test? Are experienced, excellent programmers being filtered out by "senior" programmers who don't know the correct answers?

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I'm sure I've failed several interviews because of their technical rounds. Sometimes I just don't put much effort into it and find their little tests to be ridiculous, so I don't take them seriously. It happens to everybody, I think.

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Thanks for all the comments!

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I was following along with you until the test having te wrong multiple choice answers. How does something like that even happen?

In tech fields, managers hire experts who know more than they do, so they don't have to, therefore managers can be unaware they have hired an incompetent, and have them make the test.

Being a big fan of Fractals it is possible this is a Fibonacci Sequence and the correct answer is 5.

It goes something like "start with 1" then add it to the previous number in the sequence (1st spot is a special case where it gets added to itself) so next is "1+1" or 2, as shown. Then comes '2+1" to make 3. The next step is 2+3 to give 5 (followed by 5+3 to give 8 - and so on.

If 5 was one of the choices, I would have gone with that since 4 was not present.

If that is what they did I am impressed! Clever question.

No cause to be impressed. 4 was among the answers.

Also, a symbol could also be a right answer, if the sequence is about the number of curved lines: [0, 1, 2, 3, ...]

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