[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.