Elon Musk's favorite job interview question has surfaced on TikTok.
Mechanical engineer @pinkpencilmath explained on social media that the entrepreneur loved asking the brainteaser while interviewing candidates for jobs at SpaceX and Tesla.
Quoting Musk's question, she said: "You're standing on the surface of the Earth. You take a walk one mile south, one mile west and one mile north. You end up exactly where you started. Where are you?"
Watch the TikTok below:Unsurprisingly, the riddle left TikTok users more than a little stumped.
Reacting to the question, one TikTok user wrote: "You're at a Tesla factory in China, India, or Texas [sic]."
A second added: "I feel like there are so many correct answers? insert any country, or earth?"
A third joked: "I'm not getting the job."
Meanwhile, a fourth wrote: "I'm in the interview."
The Mirror reports that there were two correct answers to the question: the North Pole and nothing – because Musk just wants to see people put their problem-solving and processing skills to use in the interview!
However, this is far from the only difficult problem-solving question Musk likes to ask while conducting job interviews, and he revealed a more general variation of it in 2017.
At the World Government Summit, the tech entrepreneur said that when he is interviewing candidates, he loves to ask them the following question: "Tell me about some of the most difficult problems you worked on and how you solved them."
He said this is because "the people who really solved the problem know exactly how they solved it". He added: "They know and can describe the little details."
The logic behind this question is that if a person didn't genuinely come up with the solution themselves, they wouldn't be able to answer this question convincingly.
Musk's question's significance is backed up by science, with a study published in the Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition finding that it's one of various techniques that can be used to identify when someone is lying during a job interview.
The technique itself is known as "Asymmetric Information Management", and it is based on the idea that a person can prove their innocence or guilt based on whether they can provide detailed information based on a response to a question.
"Small details are the lifeblood of forensic investigations and can provide investigators with facts to check and witnesses to question," Cody Porter, one of the study's authors and a Senior Teaching Fellow at the University of Portsmouth, wrote in an article for The Conversation.
So, how would you answer these questions? Let us know in the comments.
