Wow, was that ever an old-school interview. Something from a more civilized day. Today, our tradesman, a real construction veteran, interviewing at BeigeCo ("Disrupting Subdivisions") would be asked to write the chemical constituents of walnut on a whiteboard, along with its biological lifecycle.

"Hey, thanks for coming in. We're really excited to talk to front porch specialists like you."

"What would happen if you removed all the carbon from the walnut after you built a house? Don't worry, the answer isn't important, we just want to see how you think".

"I'm sure you've done a lot with nails. We're really proud of our nails stack, and our guys do a lot of optimizations. One of our guys even bent nails recently! Steve, who's a little OCD, but a great guy, really wasn't happy with the default round nails from Home Depot so he poured his own, totally square! Now we use those everywhere. We like to see that new hires can come up to speed on that fast. So imagine you were making your own nails, what tools and materials would you use? On the whiteboard, derive the optimal chemical composition for nails you'd use if you were building a doghouse that could withstand a sixteen-ton weight dropped on it from 500 meters 100 times a second."

"Oh yeah, of course I understand this is a front porch gig. Yeah, mostly support columns and floors, we do a lot of floors and we need people like you to nail them together. But we think that cosmology is important to that. After all, all those materials had to come from somewhere! (grin)"

"Back to the nails. No, no, don't use off the shelf chemicals, again we want to see how you think. Feel free to make any alloy you want. Think also about quantum effects and the impact of international taxation. White board's there, don't stress, just give it your best shot."

Later ... (somewhat visibly disappointed)

"OK, great. Well, we like to give our interviewees a little carpentry project that they can take home and work on. We'd like you to design and build a swimming pool that will be filled with not water, but German chocolate. The 100 meter Nutella breast-stroke is going to be the next Olympic event you know! (laughs). So it should be 3m deep and 100m long and don't forget the filtration system for the chocolate. Just work this up tomorrow and leave the pool in our parking lot by 5pm. I know you've got a job and deadlines and, what's that you say, oh a mortgage payment due ... but this is a really great opportunity here. We're really disrupting beige house building. Just think, when Google buys us, you can stop worrying about that mortgage!"<smile, chuckle>."

"Hey, HR forgot to ask, but can you give us the addresses and keys for the structures you've built for free in your spare time. Oh, there's nothing? Kids, I see, they can be a challenge. You spend time at the gym too? Ha ha software projects too!? I didn't know people were still writing that stuff! Anyway that's great, but I've found that our best carpenters really like to see that you've put up some free buildings, the more the better."

"Well, thanks for coming in, and what do you think of our open-air office? We think that getting rid of ceilings and roofs really helps collaboration. We leverage the Seattle rain to get us all huddled together under umbrellas and those water fights can get crazy! The people we hire really seem to enjoy that."