Yeah, but it wasn't technical. The point of the question was to assess my entrepreneurial IQ, or so I was told after. Generally if an unemployed person's applying for a job, their entrepreneurial IQ is low at the moment and they need money. Nevertheless: I was to acquire a desk to work at, which needed to have certain dimensions for under a certain dollar figure. The internet is down, the local office supply company doesn't have it, etc, etc, until I'm starting to think the interviewer is nuts. OK, I'll sit on the floor. His point was that you need to generate options, which isn't bad advice. But it was a dumb interview question.
The point of the Kobayashi-Maru test isn't to test whether they're capable of passing impossible tests, it's to test their character facing death. If you're choosing fellows to go to war with, you want to choose ones that won't shit their pants or otherwise make your last moments alive together awkward.
You can look up the Star Trek reference, but in an interviewing context, it refers to an question that is essentially impossible to answer and/or basically never occurs in real life and yet is somehow meant to judge a candidate's ability to "think outside the box" or under extreme pressure.
As well as, of course, to showcase the interviewer's vast wealth of experience and keen insight into the human condition that enables him/her to assess as much in 5 minutes from candidate's response to a completely contrived question.
