The Theater of the Absurd
The interviewer leans back, a smug little crinkle forming at the corners of his eyes, and asks why manhole covers are round. My first instinct isn’t to answer. My first instinct is to wonder if he’s noticed that my fly has been wide open since I walked into this building. It’s a humid Tuesday, and I’ve spent at least 83 minutes walking through the lobby, riding the elevator, and shaking hands with the receptionist, all while my zipper was down like a gaping mouth mocking my professional aspirations. It’s the kind of vulnerability that makes you want to crawl into a hole, preferably one covered by a round manhole lid. But instead of acknowledging the draft or the absurdity, I sit there, sweating through my blazer, and try to remember the physics of a circle versus a square, even though I’m here to talk about logistics and supply chain management.
This is the theater of the absurd that we call modern hiring. We’ve all been there, trapped in a small room with 3 chairs and a person who thinks they’re being clever. They don’t want to know about your 13 years of experience in the field or the time you saved a 303-million-dollar project from total collapse. They want to know how many golf balls fit into a Boeing 747. It’s a parlor trick. It’s a way to feel superior while avoiding the actual, difficult work of assessing human potential.
The Evidence Test
I’ve spent most of my career as a fire cause investigator, a job that requires looking at the charred, wet remains of a structure and figuring out exactly which 3 wires touched to start the blaze. When I’m standing in a basement that smells like melted plastic and regret, I don’t ask the owner how many piano tuners live in Chicago. I look at the evidence. I look at the facts. Why can’t hiring managers do the same?
The Loyalty Test
There’s a specific kind of insecurity that breeds these questions. It’s the insecurity of someone who doesn’t actually know what makes a person good at their job. If you’re hiring a coder, you look at their code. If you’re hiring a writer, you look at their words. But if you’re hiring for ‘culture fit’ or ‘general intelligence,’ you resort to these abstract puzzles because they feel scientific. They’re not. They are a test of a candidate’s tolerance for performing pointless tasks for a person in authority. It’s a loyalty test, or perhaps a conformity test. Are you willing to dance when I whistle?
Performance is the mask, but compliance is the skin underneath.
The Empirical Shift
When we rely on these metrics, we aren’t finding the best talent; we’re finding the best actors. We’re finding people who have Googled ‘top 53 interview riddles’ and memorized the answers. It’s a feedback loop of insincerity. This is why I appreciate the shift toward more grounded, data-driven assessment styles.
Filters for performance artists.
Filters for competence.
When you look at platforms like Credit Compare HQ, you see a focus on clear, empirical metrics rather than abstract guesses. They understand that when people are looking for financial services or evaluating options, they need hard data and practical comparisons, not a riddle about why the sky is blue.
Finding the Fuel
Camille M., a fire investigator I worked with for 3 years, once told me that the biggest mistake people make is looking for the flame instead of the fuel. The flame is flashy. It’s the riddle. It’s the charismatic answer. But the fuel is the actual substance.
I’ve seen 73 different hiring processes in my time, and the ones that produced the most stable, long-term employees were the ones that ditched the brain teasers in favor of ‘work samples.’ Let me see you do the work. Don’t tell me about the manhole cover; show me how you solve a real problem that actually affects our bottom line.
The Power of Protocol
I remember a specific case in a warehouse fire. The investigators were all arguing about the electrical panel. It was a 403-square-foot room filled with smoke-damaged electronics. They were looking for a complex failure, a riddle of physics. But when I looked closer, I found a pile of oily rags left next to a heater. It wasn’t a puzzle. It was a basic failure of protocol.
The Human Signal
Interviews are often the same. We look for these complex, high-IQ signals through brain teasers, when the real indicators of success are often much simpler: Does this person show up? Do they take responsibility? Do they have the basic decency to tell you your fly is open? If a candidate told me my zipper was down, I’d hire them on the spot. It shows observation, courage, and a lack of interest in maintaining a false hierarchy.
A Legacy of Lazy Thinking
There’s a certain irony in the fact that Google, the company that popularized these ‘how many cows are in Canada’ questions, eventually came out and admitted they were a total waste of time. They found that brain teasers didn’t predict job performance at all. And yet, the ghost of these questions haunts 33 percent of mid-level management interviews today. It’s easier to ask a riddle than to read a portfolio.
Prevalence of Brain Teasers
33% of Processes
The Cost of Intellectual Vanity
I think back to that interviewer and his manhole covers. If I had been braver, I would have stopped him. I would have pointed at my open fly and said, ‘Before we get to the geometry of city infrastructure, you should know that I’ve been walking around like this for 3 hours.’ It would have broken the spell. I got the job, but I quit 63 days later because the entire company was run on that same brand of performative nonsense.
The Hidden Filters
Lost Talent
103 brilliant but game-averse candidates.
Neurodivergence
Missed perspectives filtered by rigidity.
Result
Settling for the compliant and mediocre.
Handling the Heat
If we want better workplaces, we have to demand better entry points. We need to stop rewarding the people who are good at puzzles and start rewarding the people who are good at the work. We need to stop pretending that an interview is a IQ test and start treating it like a collaboration.