[sown]

This seems like kind of a trick question. The vast majority of interviewers want to hear what they want to hear, or at least have you agree.

We've all been conditioned to expect this. Then, here comes along someone with a different question where if you answer it differently, you probably don't get the job.

In my mind, I'm going to ask, "Is this a serious question? Are we just filling time?"

> Are you ready to be CEO of Google on Monday?" If they say yes, then I'll probably entertain myself by asking how they'd run the company while mentally moving on to the next candidate.

This question...it just seems so loaded and I have to disagree. I can get a 'no' vote (which is enough to end the interview process) because I give a silly answer to an uncertainly question.

If I say, "I want to build apps for non-profits" is that going to sink me during a QA interview? What if I say, "I want to enable non-profits with tech?" during a product or project manager interview? To me, both of those things are heavily intersected. But it seems like I can get stopped right there. God forbid if someone says they want to be a stay-at-home parent.

I'm going to cold read you and tell you what you want to hear.

I feel this question is less-than-helpful because it doesn't really extract any extra information yet is approached with a different angle to make the question intentionally tricky and make good candidates fail.

[ryandrake]

>> Are you ready to be CEO of Google on Monday?" If they say yes, then I'll probably entertain myself by asking how they'd run the company while mentally moving on to the next candidate.

> This question...it just seems so loaded and I have to disagree. I can get a 'no' vote (which is enough to end the interview process) because I give a silly answer to an uncertainly question.

It's a silly question, and the commentary about moving on to the next candidate shows ugly dismissiveness. What if the person sitting across from you COULD be the next CEO of Google, and you're blowing off a great find? It's not like there's only one person on Earth who is qualified to be the CEO of Google. Plenty of people could do it. I'd argue that the higher you go up the chain of command at any company, the less specific a skill set the position needs, to the point where many more people out there could be CEO of Google than could be Principal Compiler Technologies Engineer.

As others have mentioned, mostly the question is silly because, like most behavioral questions, the correct answer is: take some time to figure out what the interviewer wants to hear and feed it back to them.

[jldugger]

> What if the person sitting across from you COULD be the next CEO of Google, and you're blowing off a great find?

Then hopefully you're not on Google's CEO interview committee, and the candidate is overqualified for whatever position you have, and hiring them comes with a risk of being unable to retain them when the much greater opportunity comes knocking, leaving you where you started but a couple of months down the line.

[jazzyk]

At least when I am the interviewer, the detail of what you say is less important than your humility, humor and at least some level of enthusiasm/passion for software/work. Hopefully in addition to your technical competence (but this is not the question to assess it) :-)