I am the sysadmin and I approve this message.

I'm about to throw up.

What about trying to figure out first what the other two buttons do? Maybe they turn on the light of the room you're in. And I can see light without entering a room right? Just open the door, no need to enter it. If not allowed, look at the foot of the door or try to see if the room has a window.

No need to buy fancy equipment or even go into the room at all.

I think if its LED then the heat of the bulb strategy won't work.

Open switch panel and disconnect one switch. Wait a day. If no one complains, disconnect the second. Wait a day. If no one complains, it’s probably the third. For good measure, disconnect the third switch. If still no one complains, remove all switches and the lightbulb, since they’re not needed anymore. (The Sysadmin approach)

I used this method a few months ago in my breaker box. I needed to make room in it for an EV charger.

Only works if it’s an incandescent light

LED and fluorescent lights get hot too, it just takes a bit longer.

You can visit the room once, doesn't say you can't swap the bulb for a smart bulb and use your phone to figure it out when it enters pairing mode...

Best response! I pray I will remember it if I ever get in this situation.

The one that came up with the light bulb question. And if they have to ask why, they should go too.

Stupid interview questions show you nothing about how people think. Might as well ask them their astrological animal and blood type

That's a much better question, though! "Here's a stack trace and the source code. Walk me through where to go from here."

Most places use at least some open source software, so most places can do this, and if you ask your sys admin team nicely, there's probably some stack traces available, hot off the prod.

Are you perhaps Greg from Task Master?

Doesn't say I can't leave the door open of the room with a light, or just put someone else in the room while I flick the switchs, use a few mirrors to bounce the light back to me,

That's not the answer. It's an answer. The question isn't very contained so there are a lot of answers. You can get someone else to switch the switches in order while you watch. Or you can install a camera in the room and then pull the switches. You can keep the door open to see which switches works, etc. Probably a million more solutions.

There is no correct answer. The interviewer wants to see how you approach the problem. You can have the correct answer but still make a bad impression, or you can fail to find the standard solution and still ace this test.

i just look through the keyhole and go ham on the switches

In the private sector, I once was asked to come up with 12 uses for a kettle. I said make 12 cups of coffee. I didn't get the job.

I don't have experience with interacting with these questions in an interview, but I think these questions are supposed to be a test of problem solving ability, which could be relevant in some jobs like programming, I suppose. I still think it's stupid though.

This question in particular I'm pretty sure has a BS "outside the box" answer, where "outside the box" really means "the question is very misleading and to solve it you have to realize that when we explained this scenario, we heavily implied a set of abstracted rules you could try to solve, but we actually want you to "think outside the box" and come up with a different set of rules that, if you thought we were asking this question in good faith, you would have assumed is obviously cheating", which isn't relevant to programming skills and is also just ridiculous.

(I think the answer is :

It started when Google started hiring hoardes of people and their interview questions "that only a genius could solve" started leaking. At some point, everyone wanted to work at Google, because they had a slide and free sandwiches and whatnot.

Then, every startup, turtlenecked steve jobs-wannabe started copying those nonsensical questions that only "gifted" people could answer.

It's definitely a thing, praised by every linkedin lunatic, for finding people who "want to be a part of the family", are "willing to give it 1100%", and will do overtime for free to prove they're "worth it".

This is part of a series frequently known as "Microsoft interview" questions. The most famous one is, "Why is a manhole cover round?" They are partially meant to gauge your problem-solving abilities, but more importantly see how you react to a question you did not (and could not) prepare for. They've since fallen out of fashion, because it was always a terrible way to gauge roles like software developers.

My penis.... Wait.... No, I heard that right.

I mean, my solutions either require more information or for the question to be stupidly open-ended.

I'm fond of "leave the door open", but that only works if the doorway is visible from the switches and the space between too bright.

"send someone else into the room and call them" requires the freedom to do that, but end-runs the need for me to go into the room entirely.

Gimme two smartphones and I'm video-calling one I leave in the room.

In all of my answers and others I've seen so far, we're either making presumptions or making shit up. The question fails as an "only one right answer with only the information given" logic test, but would work to reveal how we approach problems - a personality test.