But companies routinely do this in job interviews and then get decried for asking frivolous, irrelevant questions.
When Google asks prospective PMs what a binary search or hashtable is, it's not because they actually expect product managers to ever write one. It's because those are a proxy for general CS knowledge; it shows that either they've come out of an academic CS department or they hang around engineers enough to know the basic terminology. This in turn is a proxy for "Won't demand unreasonable features from engineering and can communicate reasonably well with them." This is rather important for a tech company, as anyone who's ever worked under someone with no clue about technology could tell you.
Similarly, when companies ask how many gas stations there are in the U.S, they don't actually care what the answer is. Rather, they want to see how you respond when put in a situation where you obviously don't have enough information to come up with a precise answer. They want to see what sort of background information you draw on to make an estimate; this is often a proxy for how open and aware you are to new experiences. They want to see you combine whatever background information you have to solve a problem. They want to see you self-check and see if your answer seems reasonable.
Yet for some reason, it's clever when Van Halen does it and pedantic when it happens in a job interview...
The M&M test is very specific. If you see brown M&Ms, it means they didn't read the contract carefully or take the details seriously. That in turn means something important and potentially dangerous is likely to be seriously wrong. The snopes article states that experience confirms this prediction.
The "how many gas stations in the US" question is nothing like the brown M&Ms test. It is not testing anything nearly so specific, nor is it as easily confirmed by experience. At best you're taking a subjective interpretation of a creative answer and comparing it to subjective performance down the road. And even if you don't consider the inherent subjectivity, it's hard to document a reasonable number of positive and negative test cases; and even then controlling for other variables is essentially impossible.
Van Halen used the test to predict performance conditions for a specific date and venue. The gas stations answer is used to predict the behavior of a person for a significant period of time.
Comments
But companies routinely do this in job interviews and then get decried for asking frivolous, irrelevant questions.
When Google asks prospective PMs what a binary search or hashtable is, it's not because they actually expect product managers to ever write one. It's because those are a proxy for general CS knowledge; it shows that either they've come out of an academic CS department or they hang around engineers enough to know the basic terminology. This in turn is a proxy for "Won't demand unreasonable features from engineering and can communicate reasonably well with them." This is rather important for a tech company, as anyone who's ever worked under someone with no clue about technology could tell you.
Similarly, when companies ask how many gas stations there are in the U.S, they don't actually care what the answer is. Rather, they want to see how you respond when put in a situation where you obviously don't have enough information to come up with a precise answer. They want to see what sort of background information you draw on to make an estimate; this is often a proxy for how open and aware you are to new experiences. They want to see you combine whatever background information you have to solve a problem. They want to see you self-check and see if your answer seems reasonable.
Yet for some reason, it's clever when Van Halen does it and pedantic when it happens in a job interview...
The M&M test is very specific. If you see brown M&Ms, it means they didn't read the contract carefully or take the details seriously. That in turn means something important and potentially dangerous is likely to be seriously wrong. The snopes article states that experience confirms this prediction.
The "how many gas stations in the US" question is nothing like the brown M&Ms test. It is not testing anything nearly so specific, nor is it as easily confirmed by experience. At best you're taking a subjective interpretation of a creative answer and comparing it to subjective performance down the road. And even if you don't consider the inherent subjectivity, it's hard to document a reasonable number of positive and negative test cases; and even then controlling for other variables is essentially impossible.
Van Halen used the test to predict performance conditions for a specific date and venue. The gas stations answer is used to predict the behavior of a person for a significant period of time.