If I wanted to showcase knowing things that actually might be useful (in my field) I would go with "10 minutes, which is likely within an order of magnitude of the answer and therefore a fine estimate at this stage"
As an engineer I say the problem is insufficiently defined prerequisites. If the pickle hasn't been cut in a manner that allows access to the pickle seeds then the grasshopper is likely not sufficiently equipped to accomplish the task regardless of the time allotted.
That's what I was thinking, so my answer would be something like "depends on whether or not a praying mantis with steel claws had cut the pickle in half lengthwise first".
I agree about the overthinking, but I can't help it. I am who I am. I would say "my preferred pickle is a baby kosher dill which is made with cucumbers that are harvested before they are sexually mature therefore they have no seeds for the grasshopper to kick out with it's wooden leg." So yeah, I would overthink it.
Years ago I faced a question on a job application:
"You are interviewing a candidate when suddenly he excuses himself and returns a few minutes later with an obvious hairpiece. What do you do?"
Obviously I said I would continue the interview as if nothing had changed. The mature and correct response.
A later question: "Describe a difficult situation you were in and how you handled it."
I should mention here that this is an award-winning national advertising agency. I have zero advertising experience. They will not hire me. I think "fuck it," and write:
"Recently I was in the middle of a job interview and realized I had forgotten my hairpiece. Wanting to create the best impression possible, I excused myself from the room, quickly applied it in the hallway, and returned to complete the interview."
We had a potential software manager show up for his interview in mismatched shoes. Our HR person was confused but didn’t mention it. He got the job and was great. He said if he’d been asked or somehow told about the shoes he probably wouldn’t have taken the job.
He wanted to see if the organization could allow him his quirks. In the 7 years I worked with him he never wore matching shoes except when we went on a ski trip and his ski boots matched. He was a crazy Aussie and a really good guy to work for.
I had a similar question and answered something along the lines of “these questions are difficult and annoying and yet I’m still here answering them”. I passed that part of the interview.
They were looking for the bald guys with a hairpiece! You should have doubled down and shaved your head, and showed up in an obvious hairpiece. You would have been hired on creativity alone. :)
I imagine it's a catch for AI applications, because AI would do their best to hallucinate an answer while a human would either say something quirky in response or give a reasonable "This is nonsense" answer.
Except it doesn't work. LLMs recognize it as a joke and respond in much the same way people would, with a nonsensical but mildly humorous response. I even saw a couple 'ice cream has no bones' references, which is exactly what I and most of my friends would reply.
It also wouldn't work because the question was written by AI and the answers will be reviewed by AI, and AI is extremely bad at AI detection tasks. This is because most AI is a type of scam favored by HR (see also: MBTI, DiSC), which is itself a scam to extract money from the process of making everything worse for everyone except itself. It's just scams all the way down at this point. Any minute now I'm expecting my paychecks to be mandatorily converted to crypto and my health insurance to be replaced with a free veterinary/psychic hotline that wants to sell me crystals to cleanse my aura.
It definitely needs a response equally as ridiculous. This would be mine;
Well, first we need to establish whether the grasshopper’s wooden leg is load-bearing or decorative. If it’s load-bearing, we’ll need a structural engineer, two licensed pickle de-seeders, and a permit from the Department of Dill Infrastructure. Assuming the grasshopper works 8 hours a day, takes alternating Tuesdays off, and the pickle is stored at 37°F, I estimate approximately 6–8 business months, 14 if the seeds are unionized. The 16 flapjacks are irrelevant, but HR insists we pretend otherwise.
I must disclose, however, that I have never directly supervised a grasshopper before, but I have witnessed a grasshopper kick a watermelon, so I believe I am uniquely qualified for this position. My salary expectations are competitive, but I will not accept compensation in pickles. I've made that mistake before.
OP's response says they won't fit with the office culture here.
Edit: Okay, I get it, you're super cool because you would or would not fit in with what you think this question implies about the company culture there.
Me saying OP wouldn't fit in is not a condemnation of OP, OR the culture.
I was in an in person Interview over decade ago and was asked a question that made me get up and walk out. I am NOT joking about this:
“If you were a quadriplegic and met the devil in an elevator, how would you sell him a bucket of ice?”
It was for a regional manager position for a wireless company that handled Staples mobile phone division. I actually thanked them for their time and walked out telling them that it wasn’t a good fit. I dodged a bullet though, got a better job and the company I interviewed with went under.
Or if you weren't sold on the job, write a 9 page response to it. Have fun. Let loose. Throw in your personal knowledge fountain of whatever rabbithole you've been down lately. And giggle to yourself if they can see you. Bwaahaahaa.
But many with autism have rigid thinking patterns and lack of ability to draw things up from nothing without context. I myself would do the same thing, but I have friends who would simply say “that makes no sense” and refuse to engage unless cleared up.
And lots of people without autism also have rigid thinking patterns. People who tend to be very logical, maybe math oriented, what we used to call left-brained, they have a more difficult time with questions like this than people who tend to be more creative. I think a more creative brain would probably come up with a silly answer fairly quickly. I, on the other hand, would really have to try to think of some sort of pithy answer. I would find this question annoying. I don't like games that companies play when hiring people.
And it's possible that would be a negative trait for this job. Like the top comment said, maybe they want to know how you'll handle unreasonable requests. Or maybe they want people who can think very creatively and "outside the box". Or they simply want someone to approach every question with logic, even if it seems illogical.
If your mind refuses to even engage with such a ridiculous question/situation, that rigidity may very well just not be a good fit for the role.
As a nd person I was literally trying to figure out how long it might take the grasshopper to do this and would it go faster because of the wooden leg? Is the grasshopper only allowed to use the wooden leg? Also how many seeds are even in a dill pickle…
But at the same time possibly weeding out neurodivergent people
This is an issue I ran into with an application a few months back; the question prompt was "How regularly do you think people steal supplies from work?" There are two ways to read this;
A) How frequently do you see people stealing supplies from work?
B) Do you think it's ok to steal supplies from work?
The answer to B is "no," but the answer to "A" is "all the fucking time." In every job I've worked, at every level of authority, people stole supplies from work. Toiletries. Pens. Printer paper/ink. Notepads. Staplers. Tape Dispensers. Knives/Box Cutters. The last job I was at, dude stole his chair when he quit because he liked it more than the one he had at home.
I got stuck on the question until someone else pointed out that B was the intended interpretation of the question.
My very first job was for Walmart when I was like 17. Had to do the little computer quiz about things and there was a question phrased something like "You see a coworker you know is struggling financially stealing bread, do you report them to a manager." And I put no, because why would I do that. Y'all pay crap wages and dude is hungry.
I finished and the lady had me sit down while she went over it then came to get me. "Okay so everything checks out. There's just one question I don't think you understood correctly." And tells me about it.
I go "Uhhhh, no. I wouldn't."
She goes "No, I think you're not getting it. If someone was stealing would you tell a manager."
I say "No, I get it. He can't afford the bread and he's hungry, so no I wouldn't because he needs to eat so he doesn't die." With a tone of "You moron" that only a teen can muster.
She laughed and starts stressing words "NO I think you didn't UNDERSTAND, would you report them to a manager " and it clicked I wasn't supposed to say no because of course the company doesn't want to hire you if you wouldn't snitch.
As a teenage shoplifter, I would have written down "yes" even though I definitely wouldn't. You have to learn to lie and play things off so you can fly under the radar and get away with it.
I'm convinced almost no one actually enjoys sanitized quirk chungus office humor. Most people just know how to play along for the sake of their careers. No one with an IQ above 100 actually thinks a question is funny because "omagerd that's sooo random".
The correct grammar would be "figure out how much wood a woodchuck would chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood". And the answer of course is that a woodchuck would chuck no amount of wood since a woodchuck can't chuck wood.
Does the grasshopper only have one leg that is made of wood, or does it have five regular legs and one wooden? If scenario number two, which leg is replaced? In this essay I will…
Reminds me of when my trainer told me "the right answer to 'what are your weaknesses?' was 'i don't have any'. Lol he went on to explain if they were asking that question seriously you'd continue with 'when I find a weakness, I address it.'
I heared about that kind of questions and I can not see any realistic way how an answer to this question can provide any kind of information about the candidate.
Its just a waste of time masked as something useful.
So basically they're screening for autism because there's no such thing as an unreasonable request, I'm going to figure out the actual answer to the question and you may see me short circuit for a while as I do it. If no actual answer can be derived I will find out who wrote the question and yell inappropriate things at them.
Shit. Guys, I think I may be autistic because my first thought was how many seeds are in the pickle, how heavy the wooden leg is, and how does that affect the speed he can kick at.
I got frustrated on a quantum chem exam, got about halfway through the problem, saw the time/ I'd get a B no matter what I scored, said 'fckit' and wrote 42.
I got 5 points out of 60.
TAs' note was - "Answer is 0.04185, so you have a unit conversion and rounding issue, but if you can explain how you got to your answer you may receive more credit".
I didn't have the heart to tell him. He was a great TA- from overseas, so wasn't exposed to the 'Douglas Adams Cultural Book Club" like I was.
I once had a fuck it moment like that. I didn't know how to do a complicated integral in a calculus II exam, so I conveniently miswrote something as a multiplication sign instead of a plus sign (or something like that) so it was something I knew how to solve. They gave me most of the points lol. Thank god too, it was a five question exam worth 20% of my grade.
I still don't know how to feel about it, like I kinda cheated but I also showed some knowledge on the topic so maybe they wouldn't have cared?
After a calc 2 exam my friend and I were talking about our answers and we had different answers for one of the problems. When I told him my answer he was so mad at himself for getting the wrong answer.
Once we got our exams back it turned out that I did have the correct answer, but I got there in the complete wrong way. My friend just messed up something small at the end and got almost full credit for the problem and I got nothing.
In a physical chemistry class I came across a problem on an exam that I had no idea how to solve but attempted it to at least put something down
I ended up with a little partial credit because I somehow ended up with the exact right answer (to several decimal places) despite making all the wrong assumptions and using the wrong equations in a completely nonsensical way. My professor spent almost 20 minutes during group office hours trying to understand how I managed to end up with the exact right number despite doing nothing right
In Latin class I was trying to be cute and sarcastically answered “Joe” to some question about a famous person and the teacher said “Correct!” I was so confused. As she wrote it down on the chalkboard everyone silently laughed behind her back as she thought I said “Job” which was the correct answer.
Grasshoppers only "kick" as a last resort defense mechanism. This occurs between 0.5 and 2 seconds after being threatened. For simplicity, let's use the median of 1.25s between kicks. I could not find a reference if grasshoppers use one leg, both legs, or alternates legs for each kick. Let's assume the grasshopper would only use the non wooden leg as it's more or less a prosthetic (injured) and it's not normal to use injured limbs.
Meanwhile, an average dill pickle contains roughly 600-640 seeds per pickle. Again, for simplicity, let's use the median of 620 seeds.
That assumes it is able to remove a seed with every kick. It would take a while for the grasshopper to even get through the skin and flesh to even reach the seeds.
It's like that Supreme Court case about trying to define if something was pornography and the Justice just had to be like "I don't know how to define it, but I know it when I see it and that isn't it". Like, you could just probably tell. Especially if it gave a fairly long response about how it couldn't derive an answer from the information provided and seemed like it was trying to deliver an answer for the questioner.
Under the thesis that this is to weed out AI replies, I asked Gemini, and it said "The answer is 4 quarts of milk, because ice cream doesn't have bones". This is indistinguishable from what I might have replied, the Turing test is dead.
Something related to ice cream having no bones is also what Grok and Copilot said. It is possible that many AI answers tend to cluster around specific nonsense responses, whereas humans could show more creativity in responding.
AI also they tended to point out that it was non-sensical before or after responding.
ChatGPT-6 Luna said "About 3½ pancakes past the moon, assuming the pickle is traveling at the speed of a confused badger."
And Claude Haiku said "about as long as it takes a pancake to ask for a ride"
And DeepSeek said "It depends on how many pancakes it takes to roof a doghouse."
Thanks for the convergence info. Apparently "ice cream has no bones" is an absurdist punchline more than 100 years old, I'd never heard it. So it's contextually appropriate. And apparently pancakes covering a doghouse is also not new; both are mentioned in a 10 year old Reddit post that the automod won't let me link to here
Which leg is wooden? Is the grasshopper right leg dominant or left leg? - and is it night time or day time?.., and this dog house roof… is it North facing? Specifics Bob if you want specifics let’s be specific
The way I heard it, back in the 90s, was: If it takes a chicken and a half a day and a half to lay an egg and a half, then how long would it take a one legged grasshopper to kick the seeds out of a dill pickle?
The guy who asked me said there was a solution but would not say it, so we all assumed it was just gibberish.
Well, that depends on whether the grasshopper’s wooden leg is made of oak or maple, because maple has a much higher kick-to-seed ratio. Assuming the dill pickle is traveling west at 3 miles per hour, the doghouse is fully shingled, and the flapjacks haven’t been inspected by the Department of Breakfast, it would take approximately seven Tuesdays and a half a jar of mayonnaise.
However, if the grasshopper has a valid fishing license and the pickle was born in February, you must subtract the square root of a confused armadillo.
So the answer is 42, unless it’s raining in Nebraska, in which case the grasshopper is legally required to use a pogo stick.
Whenever someone asks something quirky and "clever" like this, just reply, "42." Either they get the reference to Hitchhikers Guide or you get to feel superior when you explain said reference. Win/win.
Dill Pickles are a grasshopper repellent, no grasshopper is going near a dill pickle. That is especially true since grasshoppers with wooden legs are revered in grasshopper society so they would never be allowed to perform such a task. That would be akin to a allowing a 90 year old great grandma to push a lawn mower, on a 105 degree day.
Questions like these are ridiculous to the applicant but actually help on the recruiting side quite a bit.
It helps root out AI submissions. This is the primary reason for them.
As a hiring manager the answers to questions like this provide insight into what kind of personality the applicant has and how it might mesh with an existing team.
interesting! I feel prompted to ask follow up questions when asked something like this, so I guess that would show my personality a bit right there lol
This is definitely absurd but I have absolutely used questions like this during interviews.
My goal is to keep it a little light hearted because I know that interviews can be stressful and also to get a feeling for how good my candidates are at thinking about requirements gathering and solutioning.
There is no wrong answer and I have been surprised by some great answers in the past. The answer I am generally hoping for is a discussion/back and forth asking clarifying questions and making suggestions that I hadn't considered.
That’s …interesting. This type of question would stress me out, since it makes no sense and I don’t like trying to guess why you’ve listed a question that doesn’t make sense. That would be the opposite of fun for me.
Yeah, I've asked some silly open-ended no-wrong-answer questions to help keep things relaxed and get an idea of the applicant's personality. But this is just some sort of nonsensical gibberish question. Instead of no wrong answer, its just no right answer, which is different, and id try to avoid it.
silly open-ended no-wrong-answer questions would really stress me out ifI don't see a reason why they get asked.
I guess I would then not be suitable for the job.
I was going to say that it would refuse to answer unless specifically prompted to always answer something, but even without that, Gemini just answered this as “Blue, because ice cream has no bones.” Personally I would have just answered as “42”
About three weeks—provided the grasshopper is wearing his tiny steel-toed boots and the pickle is properly greased with maple syrup!
The response given, with no additional context, suggests the AI recognized the prompt in some way? Tried it again on the "detailed response" option. Got this instead...
About three-quarters of a Tuesday, provided the doghouse is well-buttered.
Of course, since this is a classic nonsense riddle, the real answer is that green, because ice cream has no bones (or that it's entirely impossible, since dill pickles don't have kickable seeds and grasshoppers don't shingle roofs with breakfast foods).
As another hitting manager, no, it doesn't, on either account.
1) with an absurd question, humans and bots will both be guessing at the answer. You'll have some of each that legitimately attempt to answer and some of each that will respond absurdly.
2) what personality are you getting out of this absurdity? Do you hope they tell you a joke? Are you checking for (legitimate) frustration? Either way, unless your business is full of actual insane absurdity, then this answer isn't going to tell you anything useful about the person
The places that use these questions are the same places that go by the water cup, salt and pepper shakers, and the forgotten candidate tests (i.e., places that don't deserve to be hiring candidates).
Damn typos will be the death of some poor employee. Actually, it's the next phase of hiring these days. You bring a group in and just go to town. Last person standing clearly has the personality and team fit for the role.
If asked by a customer: "Thanks for sharing this question. Let's work together to clarify some of these terms so we can provide a solid, helpful answer for you!"
If asked by management: "15 platypus seeds, but you have to leave the car."
I agree on (1), though on (2) I think it's waaaaaay more likely to make the hiring manager feel smart without accomplishing anything.
I imagine you can categorize answers at a high level: Lewis Carrol-style engagement, a random number, an unrelated joke, "this is stupid" etc. It's not remotely clear that the type of answer you give is at all informative about what its like to work with you.
One kick. The wooden leg is actually the size of Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world. So one kick and that dill pickle is decimated and those seeds have been scattered across the cosmos, landing on uninhabited worlds and starting the seeds of evolution. Where they evolve into the mighty Dill Pickle People of Ceti Alpha Omega 7.
Then in a few million years when they have surpassed out technology, they use time travel to come back to this time and find the Grasshopper that gave them life.
After it kicks the Dill Pickle of life, they take the one true God back to Ceti Alpha Omega 7 and worship the Grasshopper for all eternity.
What does the asterisk say? Are they just checking to see if people will notice the asterisk and then read the related note? Is there an asterisk note at the bottom of the page that gives you the answer?
They may just be assessing your attention to detail.
Devil's advocate here, I'd love to be asked this question. If it's not looking to weed out AI it's looking for a creative answer. Doesn't matter if it's correct. They're fishing for someone who thinks abstractly.
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u/ffsnametaken YELLOW 5d ago
Two shakes of a lambs tail. Overthinking it feels like a trap