The interviewer called me on it, and (verbatim) said “are you fucking with me?” I still haven’t met anyone else who got told to stop fucking around in an interview.
Which she can safely take as a sign that she should be very, very glad not to have "passed" that MS interview. It may or may not have been a very useful question to ask, but the interviewer's response indicates that he had clearly let the task assigned to him go to his head, and was basically on power trip, by that point.
The question that turned me into a babbling buffoon was “have you made any friends since moving to NYC?”
Also not an appropriate question to ask, and indicates a lack of respect for basic personal boundaries on the part of the interviewer.
It was also a terrible question, since you could have absolutely no technical knowledge of elevators and thus no thoughts about improvement. It sounds like it was meant to gauge her enthusiasm for making suggestions about things she's ignorant of. She definitely dodged a bullet there.
It was an appropriate question. This was not a technical interview, it was an interview for a job with a VC firm.
Someone in VC generally needs to have an outgoing personality and good "people skills". Ease of making friends in a new city could be quite indicative of what the VC firm is looking for in a new associate.
I, personally, don't want many friends. I relate more with Dr. Weaver in MIB, i.e. "I hate the living". But I'll never be interviewing for a VC job.
Which she can safely take as a sign that she should be very, very glad not to have "passed" that MS interview. It may or may not have been a very useful question to ask, but the interviewer's response indicates that he had clearly let the task assigned to him go to his head, and was basically on power trip, by that point.
The question that turned me into a babbling buffoon was “have you made any friends since moving to NYC?”
Also not an appropriate question to ask, and indicates a lack of respect for basic personal boundaries on the part of the interviewer.