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Number of words: 209 Many of these are classic logic puzzles. Other interview questions are intended to help assign candidates to specific positions. Some of the questions that outsiders find most eccentric (Which of the fifty states would you remove? Which way should a key turn in a car door?) fall into thiscategory. They test … Read more

Number of words: 687 A crisis came when software products got too big for one person to handle. MS-DOS 1.0 was largely designed, coded, compiled, and debugged by one auteur, Tim Paterson. As software products became more complex, dividing the labor between two or more developers became necessary. That was easier said than done. Chunks … Read more

Number of words: 267 The story now turns to Lewis Terman’s son, Frederick. You will see the name “Terman” all over Stanford’s buildings today. It is mostly Frederick who is being immortalized. The younger Terman, an electrical engineer, was a professor, a dean, and later the acting president of Stanford. As much as anyone, he … Read more

Number of words: 407 One of the reasons for the popularity of Terman’s test was that the scores were expressed as a catchy number — the intelligence quotient, or IQ. Psychologist William Stern had earlier proposed dividing a child’s “mental age” by the chronological age to get a “mental quotient” that would tell how smart … Read more

Number of words: 246 Feeling an outsider because of his intellect, Terman grew to be fascinated by the whole idea of intelligence and how it might be measured. After drifting through careers and ending up on the West Coast, Terman took a teaching job at Stanford in 1910. Founded only nineteen years earlier, Leland Stanford’s … Read more

Number of words: 438 Human resources experts categorize interview questions with terms such as “traditional” and “behavioral.” Traditional questions include the old standards that almost any American job seeker knows by heart. Where do you see yourself in five years? What do you do on your day off? What’s the last book you’ve read? What … Read more

Number of words: 393 Ambady had originally wanted to study what makes teachers effective. She suspected that nonverbal cues — body language and such — were important. To test this, she used some videotapes that had been made of a group of Harvard teaching fellows. She planned to show silent video clips to a group … Read more

Number of words: 63 As classicists point out, those video games update the ancient Greek legend of Oedipus and the sphinx. The sphinx devoured anyone who couldn’t answer her riddle: “What is it that walks on four legs in the morning, two legs at noon, and three legs in the evening?” Excerpted from page number … Read more

Number of words: 135 “Let’s play a game of Russian roulette,” begins one interview stunt that is going the rounds at Wall Street investment banks. “You are tied to your chair and can’t get up. Here’s a gun. Here’s the barrel of the gun, six chambers, all empty. Now watch me as I put two … Read more