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The problem with these "present a tangental question / loosely unfamiliar but similar" questions is that they become useless when a candidate does know the answ
by bri3d 5y ago
The problem with these "present a tangental question / loosely unfamiliar but similar" questions is that they become useless when a candidate does know the answer as memorized trivia. At that point you're looking for a signal about "what does the candidate do when presented with something familiar but unknown" but receiving "can the candidate regurgitate an answer."
Of course you can then ask a different question, follow-ups, and so on, but you're so far off baseline compared to most candidates that the question starts to become useless.
- thomasahle 5y agoI don't think the point is that every interviewer should ask about Twitters source code, and every interviewee should memorize it. The point is to ask a few randomly sampled knowledge questions to measure how well rounded the candidate is. Taking the "first 10 lines of Twitter" is just one way to sample such questions.