Generic, inane questions in e.g. job interviews

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O_O... well, it is kind of on you to find something that gives your life purpose. No one else is going to do it for you.

I can find things to give my life purpose. Unfortunately none of them involve getting paid.

I doubt many people would find purpose in the crummy minimum wage type jobs which would be the only thing I'd be qualified to do.

The question is a 'glass half empty/half full' kind of question. It's a personality assessment question. A practical person would turn on the light switch - without assuming something bad. A nervous one may assume something bad has happened either mechanical or even criminal. Someone with poor abstraction skills may not be able to answer the question because they cannot mentally put themselves in that situation and/or they need more information before giving the 'correct' answer.

All interview questions - no matter how strange - all have a purpose and a reason. They are largely psychological assessments as well as fact gathering. It's just the way it works now. The higher paid/ more responsibility in a position, the more strange the questions become. If you know WHY they are asking these types of questions it becomes a bit easier to answer them off the cuff. A special interest in psychology helps!

Oddly, I gave a logically coherent answer and was met with complete dismissal. If the interviewer fails to understand the question they are asking, you are going to likely have problems regardless, as they are going to want some random arbitrary answer they incorrectly decided is the good answer.

I guess as we have ASD we're more likely to focus on the literal interpretation of the question (looking for a 'correct' answer), whereas interviewers probably are just focussing on how you respond, not what you respond with. There's the issue of body language as well I guess, it's possible that in some part the questions are just 'filler' whilst they evaluate the way we conduct ourselves.

I remember having to conduct an interview in college (A-levels not US college), they were looking for new computing teachers and got a few of the computing students to perform a 20min interview. All the applicants did give remarkably similar answers, it must be quite hard to differentiate between them when you've got so many people to choose from.

LOL... your logical answers were a) call the cops b) EMP or potentially c) supernatural occurrences. There is a good chance the interviewer thought you were trying to be a smart ass and just moved on.

Whenever someone is presented with a problem to solve, it is usually prudent to eliminate the simplest and most obvious things first. With no extraneous details in evidence - such as signs of a break in - starting with flipping on the light switch would be the most basic beginning.

Wow, this thread has been quite a revelation for me. It made me realise how I got my current job because the interview questions were not particularly personality or psychological based. In fact this is the case for my previous jobs too, and it's struck me how this is perhaps the only reason I got the job, because the interviews were more literal.

This is not the case for my current job, but if you're in a job with a boss who's a narcissist or very straight talking to the point of bullying, are they less likely to use the personality/psychological based interview style? My experience suggests that they are, as these bosses are literal communicators in a way, just a hurtful way. If this is true it then puts Aspies in increased danger of such environments, if left to their own devices without adequate support.

Still, I see now why I required 26 consecutive interviews to get my current job. That's not the only time either, I required 25 before I got one of my previous jobs. While that is pretty extreme, it must have shown interviewers how unable I am to do the everyday real-life drama that would be part and parcel of the workplace, and how much I perhaps took questions literally and answered them literally. If in interview situations again, I've learned something from this very thread.