12 ms·

In terms of the interview itself – I hate pop-quiz-style rapid-fire questions. Things like “What is the time complexity of bubble sort? What is hopscotch hashin

In terms of the interview itself – I hate pop-quiz-style rapid-fire questions. Things like “What is the time complexity of bubble sort? What is hopscotch hashing? What’s the CAP theorem?” And on and on for fifteen minutes and twenty-odd questions. But how else is the interviewer going to prove how smart they are, and signal their dominant status to you?

justicezyx 10y ago
The word is "hate", so it seems to be a personal taste. So the question does not naturally follow.
solipsism 10y ago
Why are you so cynical about this? Don't attribute to malice what is explainable by ignorance.
- tzar 10y ago
  It's muddied somewhat by the sarcasm, but malice isn't necessarily implied nor salient in the OP's point.
- geofft 10y ago
  What room is there for ignorance in figuring out how to conduct a technical interview?
  - solipsism 10y ago
    Are you joking? Interviewing involves many skills. Technical interviewing moreso
    - geofft 10y ago
      Right. So why would we be forgiving of people being ignorant about it? I mean, yes, it's certainly possible to be ignorant about it, lots of people are. But unless you somehow want to hire people who are completely uncorrelated with being good employees, the distinction between unwittingly and wittingly being a terrible interviewer seems a bit thin.
      - solipsism 10y ago
        I never implied we should be tolerant of ignorance. "It isn't necessarily malice" is what I basically said. That's not the same as "It's ignorance and that's great." And the distinction isn't thin. It's the difference between an easily solvable problem and a really hard to solve problem.
- Consultant32452 10y ago
  Yeah, it's often difficult to find the line between asking someone basic questions to confirm they have the skills/knowledge/experience they claim to have and just firing random academic/esoteric questions at them that would be easily googleable. I'm not sure the questions matter as much as the interpretations of the answers (or lack therof). If you say you have experience with a framework I'll ask enough specific questions to know whether or not you've worked with it. I don't care if you miss questions that you may not have come across. And of course as the interviewee it's important to recognize that you shouldn't be expected to know every nook and cranny of every detail unless you claim to know it.
- CodeMage 10y ago
  Ignorance that can easily be misinterpreted as malice is actually just a passive form of malice.
  - solipsism 10y ago
    Nonsense. Ignorance is fixed by teaching. Malice is not.
angryredblock 10y ago
My response to such questions is usually along the lines 'Sorry, didn't realize I was interviewing for my ability to perform 5-second google searches.' If 'getting the job' in that instance is the metric of success, then it doesn't work well at all, but in quality-of-life terms it's served me well.
- derekdahmer 10y ago
  Being passive aggressive in an interview will never get you the job. Huge red flag on the hiring side. If you don'the like the interview style enough to not want the job, just politely leave.
  - angryredblock 10y ago
    If you're happy to allow fellow humans to continue along a poor path, sure. I believe in establishing feedback loops and giving people opportunities to grow. Tongue-in-cheek aside, of course passive-aggressive isn't the ideal path to improving interview processes. :P
  - kafkaesq 10y ago
    It's pretty clear that the commenter's intent was not to turn the interview around and get hired, with that remark.
    - Crito 10y ago
      Why be rude to the interviewer even if that is the case? What does such juvenile rudeness accomplish? Is it genuinely offensive to be asked the complexity of bubble sort? If such a question causes you so much offense that you lash out involuntarily, then you have some serious personal problems to work out.
      - kafkaesq 10y ago
        Is it genuinely offensive to be asked the complexity of bubble sort? Offensive, no. Just trite and tedious. And more fundamentally, simply not indicative of the high quality, (genuinely) cerebral environment the interview subject, back in the original article, is looking for. Why be rude to the interviewer even if that is the case? I get that it's generally better to be polite. But when the same kinds of tedious and disspiriting (and sometimes downright condescending, and/or simply time-wasting) behaviors come down the interviewing pipe, over and over again... I can understand the temptation to bypass decorum, and allow a gut-level, emotional response to surface. Being as while we might generally prefer to keep things professional -- we're not potted plants, either.
bhrt0 10y ago
Do doctors also feel hurt when they are being asked questions on "how would you handle the patients with such and such symptoms" and expected to give a textbook answer?
- chris_7 10y ago
  The idea of a doctor who is unsure giving an answer instead of taking time to research is scary. Maybe that's why misdiagnosis is so common: http://www.ncpa.org/sub/dpd/index.php?Article_ID=23148 http://www.ncpa.org/sub/dpd/index.php?Article_ID=23148
  - fma 10y ago
    "Despite these statistics, many doctors are reluctant to report diagnostic errors, even anonymously, despite the likelihood of moderate to severe harm on the patient" Not sure why doctors don't look after their patients. Is it because there is no incentive to? If they do bad diagnosis that means the patient comes back and the doctor gets more money. As long as they don't get sued there's really no harm to the doctor. As a software engineers we are incentivized to perform well. A crappy system means time spent debugging issues, money lost for our employer. We also take pride in building good systems so we can take that experience to the next company and get s higher wage or position.
- arglebarnacle 10y ago
  That analogy would make more sense if software engineering required as many time-sensitive split second decisions as doctoring does. Doctors go through years of schooling involving a substantial amount of memorization as well as board exams, residencies and so on before they're allowed to do much doctoring at all. This is the case because it is crucial that they not forget in an exam that neck pain combined with a headache could be a sign of meningitis, etc. If an engineer needs to know which sorting algorithm is best, taking some time to research and google it is not going to cause a problem. That's why questions like this are bad, even offensive--they make people feel as though they're bad engineers when actually they're being put through an ineffective interviewing process.
logfromblammo 10y ago
The best revenge for that is to ace the technical questions, and then ask painfully, acutely relevant questions about the company's financials, their development process, their technical debt, and their competition. Please note that I have never been called back after doing that. A genuine technical interview can and will be cut short immediately once it becomes clear that you are not bullshitting on your resume. The person who still asks that 20th question after you have already answered the previous 19 correctly is just being an ass, and playing stupid, time-wasting games with your interview.
- kafkaesq 10y ago
  Or is a junior engineer "just following orders." This is quite common practice, actually.
  - LoSboccacc 10y ago
    The end result is the same, if there is another option available: run If the company focus on trivia that much on interviews and let juniors run the show expect no good senior working in there. That's never going to end well.
- __jal 10y ago
  Heh. I did that once (with financials, I do learn what I can before going in). It was astounding how uptight and offended the interviewer got. Pretty sure he was an outlier, but it was very satisfying. I ended it by telling him I wasn't interested, and the reaction was even more satisfying. That's the only time I've been that intentionally rude. He really deserved it, though. And (consistent with my other comment in this thread) I'd name them, but (a) they went out of business a long time ago, and (b) I can't quite remember the name of the firm. Something "clever" ca. 2004, missing a vowel.
- aianus 10y ago
  > then ask painfully, acutely relevant questions about the company's financials, their development process, their technical debt, and their competition. Is it rude to do that in an interview? How am I supposed to decide if I want to work for a company without some insight into those things?
superlad 10y ago
Pop quiz style is much better than asking a single question and then diving deep into it. The most important part is that the candidate can say "pass" and that you don't force them to squeeze out a shitty answer. There is simply no better way to find out the breadth of someone's knowledge than to quiz them over a broad range of things. Think about it: this is exactly what engineers do with each other naturally and in a fun way over time. "Hey, do you know about X?" Compare this with Google's idiotic idea of asking a single question and judging the candidate on that randomly selected question. No one who knows their stuff will fail to answer a long list of pop quiz questions well...but anyone of any skill level might not know the answer to any particular question.
- SamReidHughes 10y ago
  I'm pretty sure Google has multiple interviews with multiple questions.
- gracenotes 10y ago
  I am not sure I agree with this focus. As someone who does not exactly do single-question technical interviews but more like two- or three-question ones, my goal is somewhere in the vicinity of measuring the software engineering version of IQ. Granted, free form technical interviews are well known to be bad at this, but all the other ways seem worse. Bloom's taxonomy[1] is useful here I think. Assessment ideally shouldn't stall at 'understand' or 'remember'. I do agree it is important to know about a large variety of things. The more specialized the job is, the more important it is for a candidate to do a decent subset of it on day 1. But sometimes you can explore a candidate's knowledge through 'apply' (use X to do Y) or 'analyze' and 'evaluate' (do Y), such as in a system design question, to see the structure of their thought process rather than something more scattershot. Finally, regarding skipping a question, sometimes you can sense that a candidate's knowledge is limited in some area, which is a good time to just move on and try to go deep on something else. Not everyone has been afforded the same opportunities and has the same amount of experience. Software is a job where the potential to grow can do you better than a fixed skill set, especially if you see hiring as similar to making an investment. [1] https://cft.vanderbilt.edu/guides-sub-pages/blooms-taxonomy/ https://cft.vanderbilt.edu/guides-sub-pages/blooms-taxonomy/
hvidgaard 10y ago
I have a CS degree, I focused quite a bit on distributed systems. I also deal with it day to day. But if you asked me what the CAP theorem is, I'd have to look it up. Same for bubble sort. If we first establish how it works I can figure out the complexity, but why memorize stuff I can look up on wikipedia if I need it?
- qb45 10y ago
  "CAP theorem" is a pretentious name for the idea that in the event of network partition you have to give up availability or consistency. Or both ;) And yes, I too keep forgetting this name but I could talk about the issue if they explained what real problem they have. As for bubble sort, I'd just write for (i=1; i<n; i++) for (j=i; j>0; j--) if (X[j-1] > X[j]) swap(j-1,j); and see if they notice that it actually is insertion sort, my personal favorite O(n²) algo. If they still want to reject me then well, I probably don't want to know them anyway. And insertion sort actually is better. It can be made to work online, keeping all elements seen so far sorted before receiving the next element. And I think it ought to be more cache friendly than bubble sort.
qb45 10y ago
> But how else is the interviewer going to prove how smart they are, and signal their dominant status to you? 1. This isn't the sole and probably not even the dominant reason for such questions. 2. When people resort to such intimidation you can out-alpha them by threatening to leave as if they were not worth your time (has to be convincing, ofc). Intimidation is a specialty of the insecure so this trick can work, though you may want to consider whether such job is going to be fun.
eveningcoffee 10y ago
I think that user Stratoscope has noticed something more interesting: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12661902 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12661902 He finds that such trivia quizzes are strongly biased towards supporting younger candidates who are fresh out of college.

justicezyx 10y ago

The word is "hate", so it seems to be a personal taste. So the question does not naturally follow.

solipsism 10y ago

Why are you so cynical about this? Don't attribute to malice what is explainable by ignorance.

tzar 10y ago
It's muddied somewhat by the sarcasm, but malice isn't necessarily implied nor salient in the OP's point.
geofft 10y ago
What room is there for ignorance in figuring out how to conduct a technical interview?
- solipsism 10y ago
  Are you joking? Interviewing involves many skills. Technical interviewing moreso
  - geofft 10y ago
    Right. So why would we be forgiving of people being ignorant about it? I mean, yes, it's certainly possible to be ignorant about it, lots of people are. But unless you somehow want to hire people who are completely uncorrelated with being good employees, the distinction between unwittingly and wittingly being a terrible interviewer seems a bit thin.
    - solipsism 10y ago
      I never implied we should be tolerant of ignorance. "It isn't necessarily malice" is what I basically said. That's not the same as "It's ignorance and that's great." And the distinction isn't thin. It's the difference between an easily solvable problem and a really hard to solve problem.
Consultant32452 10y ago
Yeah, it's often difficult to find the line between asking someone basic questions to confirm they have the skills/knowledge/experience they claim to have and just firing random academic/esoteric questions at them that would be easily googleable. I'm not sure the questions matter as much as the interpretations of the answers (or lack therof). If you say you have experience with a framework I'll ask enough specific questions to know whether or not you've worked with it. I don't care if you miss questions that you may not have come across. And of course as the interviewee it's important to recognize that you shouldn't be expected to know every nook and cranny of every detail unless you claim to know it.
CodeMage 10y ago
Ignorance that can easily be misinterpreted as malice is actually just a passive form of malice.
- solipsism 10y ago
  Nonsense. Ignorance is fixed by teaching. Malice is not.

angryredblock 10y ago

My response to such questions is usually along the lines 'Sorry, didn't realize I was interviewing for my ability to perform 5-second google searches.' If 'getting the job' in that instance is the metric of success, then it doesn't work well at all, but in quality-of-life terms it's served me well.

derekdahmer 10y ago
Being passive aggressive in an interview will never get you the job. Huge red flag on the hiring side. If you don'the like the interview style enough to not want the job, just politely leave.
- angryredblock 10y ago
  If you're happy to allow fellow humans to continue along a poor path, sure. I believe in establishing feedback loops and giving people opportunities to grow. Tongue-in-cheek aside, of course passive-aggressive isn't the ideal path to improving interview processes. :P
- kafkaesq 10y ago
  It's pretty clear that the commenter's intent was not to turn the interview around and get hired, with that remark.
  - Crito 10y ago
    Why be rude to the interviewer even if that is the case? What does such juvenile rudeness accomplish? Is it genuinely offensive to be asked the complexity of bubble sort? If such a question causes you so much offense that you lash out involuntarily, then you have some serious personal problems to work out.
    - kafkaesq 10y ago
      Is it genuinely offensive to be asked the complexity of bubble sort? Offensive, no. Just trite and tedious. And more fundamentally, simply not indicative of the high quality, (genuinely) cerebral environment the interview subject, back in the original article, is looking for. Why be rude to the interviewer even if that is the case? I get that it's generally better to be polite. But when the same kinds of tedious and disspiriting (and sometimes downright condescending, and/or simply time-wasting) behaviors come down the interviewing pipe, over and over again... I can understand the temptation to bypass decorum, and allow a gut-level, emotional response to surface. Being as while we might generally prefer to keep things professional -- we're not potted plants, either.

bhrt0 10y ago

Do doctors also feel hurt when they are being asked questions on "how would you handle the patients with such and such symptoms" and expected to give a textbook answer?

chris_7 10y ago
The idea of a doctor who is unsure giving an answer instead of taking time to research is scary. Maybe that's why misdiagnosis is so common: http://www.ncpa.org/sub/dpd/index.php?Article_ID=23148 http://www.ncpa.org/sub/dpd/index.php?Article_ID=23148
- fma 10y ago
  "Despite these statistics, many doctors are reluctant to report diagnostic errors, even anonymously, despite the likelihood of moderate to severe harm on the patient" Not sure why doctors don't look after their patients. Is it because there is no incentive to? If they do bad diagnosis that means the patient comes back and the doctor gets more money. As long as they don't get sued there's really no harm to the doctor. As a software engineers we are incentivized to perform well. A crappy system means time spent debugging issues, money lost for our employer. We also take pride in building good systems so we can take that experience to the next company and get s higher wage or position.
arglebarnacle 10y ago
That analogy would make more sense if software engineering required as many time-sensitive split second decisions as doctoring does. Doctors go through years of schooling involving a substantial amount of memorization as well as board exams, residencies and so on before they're allowed to do much doctoring at all. This is the case because it is crucial that they not forget in an exam that neck pain combined with a headache could be a sign of meningitis, etc. If an engineer needs to know which sorting algorithm is best, taking some time to research and google it is not going to cause a problem. That's why questions like this are bad, even offensive--they make people feel as though they're bad engineers when actually they're being put through an ineffective interviewing process.

logfromblammo 10y ago

The best revenge for that is to ace the technical questions, and then ask painfully, acutely relevant questions about the company's financials, their development process, their technical debt, and their competition. Please note that I have never been called back after doing that. A genuine technical interview can and will be cut short immediately once it becomes clear that you are not bullshitting on your resume. The person who still asks that 20th question after you have already answered the previous 19 correctly is just being an ass, and playing stupid, time-wasting games with your interview.

kafkaesq 10y ago
Or is a junior engineer "just following orders." This is quite common practice, actually.
- LoSboccacc 10y ago
  The end result is the same, if there is another option available: run If the company focus on trivia that much on interviews and let juniors run the show expect no good senior working in there. That's never going to end well.
__jal 10y ago
Heh. I did that once (with financials, I do learn what I can before going in). It was astounding how uptight and offended the interviewer got. Pretty sure he was an outlier, but it was very satisfying. I ended it by telling him I wasn't interested, and the reaction was even more satisfying. That's the only time I've been that intentionally rude. He really deserved it, though. And (consistent with my other comment in this thread) I'd name them, but (a) they went out of business a long time ago, and (b) I can't quite remember the name of the firm. Something "clever" ca. 2004, missing a vowel.
aianus 10y ago
> then ask painfully, acutely relevant questions about the company's financials, their development process, their technical debt, and their competition. Is it rude to do that in an interview? How am I supposed to decide if I want to work for a company without some insight into those things?

superlad 10y ago

Pop quiz style is much better than asking a single question and then diving deep into it. The most important part is that the candidate can say "pass" and that you don't force them to squeeze out a shitty answer. There is simply no better way to find out the breadth of someone's knowledge than to quiz them over a broad range of things. Think about it: this is exactly what engineers do with each other naturally and in a fun way over time. "Hey, do you know about X?" Compare this with Google's idiotic idea of asking a single question and judging the candidate on that randomly selected question. No one who knows their stuff will fail to answer a long list of pop quiz questions well...but anyone of any skill level might not know the answer to any particular question.

SamReidHughes 10y ago
I'm pretty sure Google has multiple interviews with multiple questions.
gracenotes 10y ago
I am not sure I agree with this focus. As someone who does not exactly do single-question technical interviews but more like two- or three-question ones, my goal is somewhere in the vicinity of measuring the software engineering version of IQ. Granted, free form technical interviews are well known to be bad at this, but all the other ways seem worse. Bloom's taxonomy[1] is useful here I think. Assessment ideally shouldn't stall at 'understand' or 'remember'. I do agree it is important to know about a large variety of things. The more specialized the job is, the more important it is for a candidate to do a decent subset of it on day 1. But sometimes you can explore a candidate's knowledge through 'apply' (use X to do Y) or 'analyze' and 'evaluate' (do Y), such as in a system design question, to see the structure of their thought process rather than something more scattershot. Finally, regarding skipping a question, sometimes you can sense that a candidate's knowledge is limited in some area, which is a good time to just move on and try to go deep on something else. Not everyone has been afforded the same opportunities and has the same amount of experience. Software is a job where the potential to grow can do you better than a fixed skill set, especially if you see hiring as similar to making an investment. [1] https://cft.vanderbilt.edu/guides-sub-pages/blooms-taxonomy/ https://cft.vanderbilt.edu/guides-sub-pages/blooms-taxonomy/

hvidgaard 10y ago

I have a CS degree, I focused quite a bit on distributed systems. I also deal with it day to day. But if you asked me what the CAP theorem is, I'd have to look it up. Same for bubble sort. If we first establish how it works I can figure out the complexity, but why memorize stuff I can look up on wikipedia if I need it?

qb45 10y ago
"CAP theorem" is a pretentious name for the idea that in the event of network partition you have to give up availability or consistency. Or both ;) And yes, I too keep forgetting this name but I could talk about the issue if they explained what real problem they have. As for bubble sort, I'd just write for (i=1; i<n; i++) for (j=i; j>0; j--) if (X[j-1] > X[j]) swap(j-1,j); and see if they notice that it actually is insertion sort, my personal favorite O(n²) algo. If they still want to reject me then well, I probably don't want to know them anyway. And insertion sort actually is better. It can be made to work online, keeping all elements seen so far sorted before receiving the next element. And I think it ought to be more cache friendly than bubble sort.

qb45 10y ago

> But how else is the interviewer going to prove how smart they are, and signal their dominant status to you? 1. This isn't the sole and probably not even the dominant reason for such questions. 2. When people resort to such intimidation you can out-alpha them by threatening to leave as if they were not worth your time (has to be convincing, ofc). Intimidation is a specialty of the insecure so this trick can work, though you may want to consider whether such job is going to be fun.

eveningcoffee 10y ago

I think that user Stratoscope has noticed something more interesting: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12661902 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12661902 He finds that such trivia quizzes are strongly biased towards supporting younger candidates who are fresh out of college.