Bengaluru’s unpredictable rain costs candidate a 40 LPA job offer. Here's why

A Bengaluru recruiter’s LinkedIn post went viral after detailing how a candidate lost a ₹40 lakh job for overanalyzing an umbrella question.

A LinkedIn post by a Bengaluru-based tech professional is going viral after he revealed why a Product Manager candidate lost out on a lucrative ₹40 lakh per annum job offer, for trying to logically explain Bengaluru’s famously unpredictable weather.

Bengaluru has just registered its wettest May ever, rewriting the record books. (PTI)

In the post, the recruiter described how he posed a seemingly simple estimation question during the interview. “How many days in a year should someone carry an umbrella in Bengaluru?” But the candidate took the question a bit too seriously.

“Whips out a notepad. Talks about monsoon trends, probability distributions, historical rainfall data, commute hour segmentation, complex test scenarios... and then proudly says: ‘So, 55.7 days, with a 95 per cent confidence interval,’” the interviewer wrote.

Impressed? Not quite.

“I looked at him and said, ‘Wrong.’”

The interviewer, who appears to be a seasoned Bengalurean, said the answer missed the point entirely. “Bengaluru is not just another city. You don’t calculate rain here. You sense it in your bones. You carry an umbrella even on a sunny day, just in case,” the post read.

He added that the candidate didn’t fail due to poor maths skills but for trying to “reduce Bengaluru, a city of clouds, gardens, and surprises, to just another dot on the map.”

Read his full post here:

Bengaluru's wettest May

Bengaluru has just registered its wettest May ever, rewriting the record books yet again. As of 6 am on May 26, the city had received 307.9 mm of rainfall, surpassing last year’s high of 305.4 mm, according to a report in Deccan Herald.

This isn't just a repeat of 2023’s intense weather, it also pushes Bengaluru even further past the 28 cm mark set in May 1957, a record that had stood unchallenged for over six decades until last year. With several days still left in the month, this May’s rain tally could climb even higher, cementing 2024 as another extraordinary year in the city’s changing weather history.