Today is the 3848th day of intensive reading to accompany you in your lifelong growth
The Intensive Reading Jun General Knowledge Dictionary has 2079 entries online
01
Can you imagine?
The company recruited 85 employees, and all of them were liars!
Good fellow, I don't dare to make up stories like this, but this is not an exception.
Some time ago, the Shanghai Pudong New Area People's Procuratorate handled a case of professional salary fraud by a large gang.
From 2020 to now, they have scooped more than 260 companies and defrauded more than 35 million.
How do they do it?
Before employment: fictitious work experience, work ability, and falsification of academic qualifications.
After joining the company: fabricate customer visit records to defraud the company's basic salary and business reimbursement.
When the company suspects dismissal, it will also disguise that the customer's funds will arrive immediately to delay the employment time and cheat the salary.
Among them are a couple and the lady is highly Chinese.
In the past few years, she and her husband have joined more than 100 companies in Shanghai.
According to my confession, she and her husband's highest record is that each of them joins more than 10 companies every month, and each of them has a monthly salary of more than 200,000 yuan.
In the past two years, the two have worked in 197 units and received a salary of nearly 2 million.
This counterfeiting gang not only squeezed out the position of real job seekers, but also directly wiped out the company, making the already not rich position even worse.
In addition, the environment in which artificial intelligence such as ChatGPT replaces human work has also arrived.
For example, the Washington Post reported in 2023 that the 25-year-old girl's copywriting job was replaced by GPT.
After being fired, he only got a job walking his dog.
Another freelancer changed careers to fix air conditioners.
So, where do people in the workplace go from here?
In the future, a job may have a shorter shelf life, so both employers and employees need to be prepared for increasingly flexible and new positions.
Rare and precious talents become those who can learn new skills and invent new jobs.
William Poundstone's How to Deal with a Duck as Big as a Horse is a guide to the new era of interviewing, where we can learn to solve problems creatively, gain new perspectives, and grow.
02
Okay, let's try to go to Musk's company for an interview.
Get the following questions:
Hot dogs crack when they expand when heated. In which direction will it crack and why?
Based on our experience with hot dogs, we know that it splits horizontally.
But why does it show up in an interview?
This question, which was first used in an admission interview at Oxford University and then as an interview question for SpaceX (Musk's rocket launch company), examines top engineer candidates and requires more rigorous answers.
Could it be that hot dogs and rockets can have anything to do with each other?
That's right! The two are indeed extremely closely related.
The shell of the rocket is subjected to staggering pressure, and if it fails to launch, it will crack like a hot dog.
Not only that, but frozen water pipes, ultra-high-pressure boilers, and the fuselages of submarines and airplanes are facing the same problem.
Therefore, the workplace interview is not untargeted.
It requires the engineer candidate to really understand these relevant principles and quickly find out how they connect.
There is also such a story about the interview.
At the end of World War I, a German engineer invented an encryption machine.
At the beginning of World War II, Britain recognized that encryption machines were a threat and began recruiting codebreakers.
In 1941, the Daily Telegraph held a crossword contest in which the code was solved in ten minutes, and the winner was awarded £500, and five people won and then became decipherers.
Later, the British created what became the Giant Computer, the world's first programmable electronic digital computer.
It can be seen that this kind of logic question is a good test of ability.
However, compared with this kind of daily logic questions, there are more strange questions circulating on the Internet.
For example, Zhihu these hot posts:
What would you do if there were 5 glasses of water but 6 leaders came?
Interviewer: How do you remind me that the zipper of my pants is open?
The sales manager asked you to sell a bottle of mineral water for 300 yuan, how do you do it?
If you are interested, you can try to answer it yourself.
03
The title of this book is also a very famous one:
Would you rather fight a duck the size of a horse or 100 horses the size of a duck?
It seems to be a question with no gold content, but it seems that it can be answered no matter what.
There really is no standard answer to this, which means that as long as you make sense, it is your correct answer.
The interview is about how the respondent thinks about the question and proves that he or she has made the right choice.
Based on this, they can roughly determine the candidate's knowledge structure, way of thinking, and areas of expertise, so as to recruit more suitable people for specific positions.
So, as a candidate, how do you learn to solve problems that you are not familiar with?
George Polya, a mathematician at Stanford University, said: "Problems are problems because you don't know where to start."
Title:
If I write down all numbers from 1~1 million, how many times will the number 2 be written?
The problem-solving technique for this problem is to try a simple version of the problem.
Replace 1 million with 10, and 2 should be written 1 time.
Replace 1 million with 100, 2 to write 20 times. 10 times for single digit + 10 times for 10th digit.
There are 7 digits in 1,000,000, ignore the first column and see how many 2s there are on each digit after it.
6*1000000➗10=600000 times.
When you encounter a problem, the first thing to do is to find the entry point.
04
You probably wouldn't have imagined that the appearance of these strange interview questions is actually related to Edison.
At that time, Edison built his own light bulb factory. Once, when he talked about the cherry tree on the mountain, he noticed that many people did not notice it.
Observation should be a must-have.
So, Edison wrote a 48-question questionnaire for new interviewers, and this question stumped most of the applicants.
Because Edison was so influential because of the light bulb at that time, the interview question was vigorously reported by the news media.
At that time, Einstein was also asked by the media to do a question, and he also answered one incorrectly: what is the speed of sound?
Because Einstein said that it was in this book, he didn't write it down in his head.
Now, the interview questions are more widely exposed.
Edison complained that his hard-earned questions had been missed, so he had to rewrite 150 new papers and issue a lawsuit warning to the media.
However, the new question was still exposed by the media.
In this way, many companies have started to use questionnaires to test their abilities when recruiting.
Edison also made mistakes, though. Because, there is no set of questionnaires in the world that can really assess who is better.
No matter what kind of investigation you take, there will be deviations.
Edison himself was a genius aura breaker.
He said: I have never come up with any ideas in my life, my so-called inventions have been around me for a long time, I just discovered them. I have created nothing. No one is really creating.
In the midst of trial and error, he never gave up until he carried the light bulb forward.
Steve Jobs also said that creativity is about connecting different things.
So creative problem-solving is about trial and error until you succeed.
If it doesn't work, it's because there aren't enough experiments.
However, good problem solvers don't blindly try and make mistakes, but rather constantly refresh their intuition about what they're going to do next.
Bless you with the early success of inventing your own lamp.