Please tell me there was more to that last story? Having someone come in and have a strong opinion on a topic, and have the gumption to state so in an interview

Please tell me there was more to that last story? Having someone come in and have a strong opinion on a topic, and have the gumption to state so in an interview, is exactly what I would look for. Did you poke them for more? Did you ask how JSON compares to XML? If they only answers "Well, I've never used XML, but I was trained on JSON and won't ever use XML, I don't know any of the downsides of XML", then you were correct to pass on them. But if they responded "Because of reasons X, Y, and Z, JSON is better than XML, and all XML interfaces are equivalent in this way, so I can't really answer your question because while I know enough about XML to know that it's bad, I can't tell you exactly the difference between different interfaces, as I've avoided them." That would be an answer I would accept. > got the answer right away This is the major critique of asking these interview questions. There's a small subset of them, so candidates train on exactly them, and only know how to do these, and when you hire them they won't be able to actually code anything. Using ML terms, they're 'overfit'. Getting it right away is actually a bad thing, but then you get candidates who act like they are going through the process just to look like they are learning on the spot... it's a tough problem.