"Do you watch porn?" Provocative questions to test stress tolerance or for other purposes, which are asked to candidates at interviews

In general, the Government supports provocative questions in interviews, such as: «What will you do if a colleague blocks you?»

1. «They asked me how I felt about garden gnomes. I said I was friends with them. They never hired me for this job,» — HR generalist Maria Kolesnik .
2. «They asked us to count from 100 to zero out loud while simultaneously solving a problem on a piece of paper,» — DevOps Engineer Andriy Prystupa .
3. «Once, in one office, they asked me about drugs, drinking, and gambling addiction during a polygraph test, but they didn’t even ask about porn. And in vain, I could share my experience,» — Software Solutions Architect, IT Consultant, Oleksiy Zelenyuk .
4. «Once I was asked: — «How do you think we know that your boyfriend’s name is (so-and-so)?» They also asked me to admit that it was my boyfriend who gave me the test task. At that time, I was a qa with about half a year of experience, and the guy was a developer and taught development courses.
   I spent the whole weekend on that task, and as a result, I got such an attitude, such questions, and the conclusion about me: «You just don’t know how to sell yourself.» It was the second technical interview at that company, after a successful first technical one. There were five people at the interview and I, with the third interview in my entire life (the second was their first technical one), so I was confused when the questions went like this. At first, I thought maybe I answered poorly or something else was wrong with me. But more than seven years have passed, and I realized that I answered normally for my level then. There have been a lot of interviews, but such a stupid thing has never happened, and if it had happened, I would have left immediately, and not at the end on shaky legs and all in tears ,» — QA Engineer Olga Levadska .
5. «At a technical interview, I received a question from the CTO — «What do you do for a living?», at that time I was looking for a job for 4-5 months. I never thought I would ever encounter such a thing,» — System Administrator Pavlo Degtyarev .
6. «There was also an IQ test, and they asked me to draw some non-existent animal (at stage 3), which I failed, probably because they thought the animal was scary. The most favorite: «How do you live, since you haven’t worked for 9 months and aren’t even married?» — Sr. Procurement Specialist at FORM Natalia Shynkarenko .
7. «I was asked, if I go into the kitchen and see an unwashed frying pan, should I wash it or buy a new one?» — Java Developer Marina Shama .
8. «They asked me to name 20 ways to use the pen (I ended up naming 22, but what do you think is the maximum number of options?) and asked me what I would do if I got a flat tire/battery failure on the way to a very important meeting, constantly complicating the situation,» — Technical Support Engineer Serhiy Kochnev .
9. «Once I was asked if I was married, and after answering yes, the question arose: what did I do that was so extraordinary that a Jew married me?» — UI/UX Designer Nina Avram .
10. «2011. An interview with all the company’s C-level managers. The owner asks me a question. A.- What do you do at night? I.- I sleep. A.- Do you have dreams? I.- Yes. A.- And what kind? I.- This is personal information that I am not ready to share,» — iGaming, Start ups, Tanya Shevchuk .
11. «Will I be able to swallow a flash drive with pirated software (there was another option that was no less interesting) if an inspection comes unexpectedly?» — ISC2, Google certified Cybersecurity Analyst Tier 1, Yaroslav Turenko .
12. «-What color are you? — I have no idea by what criteria I can associate myself with colors. — I have to choose. — Black. — Bad,» — Frontend Developer Andriy Suprunenko .
13. «One of the most interesting cases recently was: «Imagine, you have a project and you can hire 15 full-stack devs for it, what level will they be and why?» In principle, it seemed like an adequate question. But at the end of the analysis of this case, they say «You will have a team of 2 people…» And at the same interview it was: How do you work with branches in Git during hotfixes», and then «you won’t do it anyway — that’s the task of DevOps», — CEO at Teens Academy Kyiv, Artur Smerkus .

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