Want To Work For Dropbox? Try Answering Some Of These Tough And Quirky Interview Questions
Johannes Simon/Getty ImagesDropbox CEO Drew HoustonThe hot cloud storage company Dropbox made headlines earlier this year when it landed a massive $250 million round at a $10 billion valuation.
With jaw-dropping numbers like that and rumors of a cool new office space on the horizon, Dropbox sounds like a pretty great place to work, right?
Before you get in, you've got to ace the interview. We scoured Glassdoor for interesting Dropbox interview questions.
These are the toughest, weirdest ones we could find:
"If you were given a genie lamp that can grant you any power to any person, what would you give, and to whom?"
"What is a superpower you would give to your best friend?"
"How would you explain Dropbox to a grandmother? To a very technical person?"
"If you have 1,000 sales leads/inquiries a day, how would you prioritize them?"
"Imagine a world where your car was equipped with Dropbox. Please describe that world."
"What is something that you're geeky about?"
"How would you logically deduce the number of Dropbox users starting with the world population? Explain each step in your logic."
"The Caltrain is derailed and is moving fast towards a building, a plane is crashing downtown, and a boat is sinking. If you were a superhero, in what order would you save the following scenarios and why?"
"There are two children, 5- and 6-year-olds who understand addition and subtraction. They do not understand multiplication or division. How would you explain the concept of prime numbers to them?" (Answer: Take 11 (prime number) objects and ask the children to split the objects into 2 groups with the same number of objects in each. Repeat the process and ask the children to split the 11 objects into 3 separate groups. There will always be one group with an extra object.)
"What metrics would you use to see how happy customers are?"
"What's your best party trick?"
"What can you do that nobody else can do?"
"You purchase a toaster, when you open it up at home you notice it says 'Dropbox ready.' Tell us about this world in which Dropbox is installed on your toaster."
"Describe a time when you identified an inefficiency and what you did to remedy it (or why you were unable to remedy it)."
"What do you see for the future of Dropbox music? What are the challenges going to be?"
"You are in a 90-floor building and then you get to your office. On your desk, there is a C4 bomb that is going to explode with a minute left on the clock and there are hundreds of co-workers and other workers in the building, what would you do?"
"Assume the following: 20% of the resumes you present are approved for phone screen 20% of your phone screens are approved for onsite interviews 20% of your onsite interviews are extended offers 50% of your offers are accepted. You need to hire 10 people, how many resumes do you need to present?" (Answer: "You need to work backward. 10 is the final number. (1 / 0.5) x 10 = 20 and (1 / 0.2) x 20 = 100 and (1 / 0.2) x 100 = 500> and (1 / 0.2) x 500 = 2,500 . So the answer is 2,500.")