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If you want to know how curious I am, ask me. If you want to know how disparate my knowledge is, ask me. If you want to know how good I am at guessing from cont

If you want to know how curious I am, ask me. If you want to know how disparate my knowledge is, ask me. If you want to know how good I am at guessing from context, ask me. If you're asking about meta-tag trivia, all you're going to find out is if I know meta-tag trivia. I know myself way better than any interviewer possibly can. If you don't trust me to evaluate myself, then you shouldn't be hiring me into a creative, professional, self-directed position.

thomasahle 5y ago
In my experience, lots of people apply for jobs they aren't qualified for. How does I as the interviewer know which candidates I can trust to assess themselves and which I can't?
- munk-a 5y ago
  I mean, a fair number will walk in the door talking about C-pound. A number of them will exclaim "What wizardry is that!" when you open up the developer console (or accuse you of hacking). Just do your best to sus out obvious lemons and fix the rest in post (i.e. figure out if they're full of crap during their probationary period). If you have specific pieces of technology you're working with and want to interview about then take an afternoon and just code up some bizarre snippets to go through with them - add a few mistakes they should be able to catch and just talk through their process. I honestly don't think opening up a random website and asking about some of the source code is a terrible approach... if you're interviewing someone for writing HTML in the 90's - in the modern world all the JS is minified (and likely generated by a framework), the CSS is absolutely atrocious to read (usually also generated) and the HTML is pretty much irrelevant. Use something that's going to be applicable to candidates to judge their understanding - I've always been fond of short puzzles very much unlike this one (it's way too arcane) in PHP `0x5 &$var=['cow' => 6]['cow']`[1] - just blerbs where you can step through some syntax understanding and problem solving at the same time. An actually good suggestion is to check out a random (ideally mostly self-contained) file from your codebase from a decade ago and step through what's awful about it - all code bases have these, and they're usually still kicking around as active code in production. At one of my more recent interviews they sent me login.php (the one actually in production, which they knew was broken - they had two developers before me which were really overworked) and just asked me to mark up wrong stuff - I found SQL injections, unbound variables, conditions that would result in invalid HTML and broken forms and some terrible decisions from a readability perspective. I spent... maybe an hour on it. 1. https://3v4l.org/85MV3 https://3v4l.org/85MV3
- TrickardRixx 5y ago
  My point was that you can have a conversation with a candidate instead of using arbitrary trivia that is irrelevant to the job and potentially irrelevant to the human you’re interviewing. If you want to find out about someone’s diversity of knowledge, I think “what’s the most esoteric tech you’ve worked with” or “tell me about a project that taught you the most” are vastly superior conversation starters than meta-tag trivia.
rileymat2 5y ago
“ I know myself way better than any interviewer possibly can. If you don't trust me to evaluate myself, then you shouldn't be hiring me into a creative, professional, self-directed position.” I am not sure this is well grounded in the studies of human psychology.
- munk-a 5y ago
  I think it's extremely fair to not trust people to evaluate themselves when doing open hiring - for networked candidates you can usually relax some assumptions and for very senior/niche positions there's usually ample street knowledge available... but in these cases you're relying on a third party for some level of vetting. I would never solely trust a second party during hiring unless I had some method to confirm at least some of what they're saying. A lot of companies are far too hesitant to trust employees, but blind trust is unwise - you can end up with an employee that either wastes three months salary or actively causes damage.
  - rileymat2 5y ago
    I think we may be talking about slightly different things. There is a ton of well researched psychology work on self deception, confirmation bias, it goes on and on. Asking about the things that the OP was mentioning are deep psychological traps. Perhaps the OP has deep self awareness, but that does not apply to the general candidate or human. Our blind spots of our own actions and behaviors are profound.

thomasahle 5y ago

In my experience, lots of people apply for jobs they aren't qualified for. How does I as the interviewer know which candidates I can trust to assess themselves and which I can't?

munk-a 5y ago
I mean, a fair number will walk in the door talking about C-pound. A number of them will exclaim "What wizardry is that!" when you open up the developer console (or accuse you of hacking). Just do your best to sus out obvious lemons and fix the rest in post (i.e. figure out if they're full of crap during their probationary period). If you have specific pieces of technology you're working with and want to interview about then take an afternoon and just code up some bizarre snippets to go through with them - add a few mistakes they should be able to catch and just talk through their process. I honestly don't think opening up a random website and asking about some of the source code is a terrible approach... if you're interviewing someone for writing HTML in the 90's - in the modern world all the JS is minified (and likely generated by a framework), the CSS is absolutely atrocious to read (usually also generated) and the HTML is pretty much irrelevant. Use something that's going to be applicable to candidates to judge their understanding - I've always been fond of short puzzles very much unlike this one (it's way too arcane) in PHP `0x5 &$var=['cow' => 6]['cow']`[1] - just blerbs where you can step through some syntax understanding and problem solving at the same time. An actually good suggestion is to check out a random (ideally mostly self-contained) file from your codebase from a decade ago and step through what's awful about it - all code bases have these, and they're usually still kicking around as active code in production. At one of my more recent interviews they sent me login.php (the one actually in production, which they knew was broken - they had two developers before me which were really overworked) and just asked me to mark up wrong stuff - I found SQL injections, unbound variables, conditions that would result in invalid HTML and broken forms and some terrible decisions from a readability perspective. I spent... maybe an hour on it. 1. https://3v4l.org/85MV3 https://3v4l.org/85MV3
TrickardRixx 5y ago
My point was that you can have a conversation with a candidate instead of using arbitrary trivia that is irrelevant to the job and potentially irrelevant to the human you’re interviewing. If you want to find out about someone’s diversity of knowledge, I think “what’s the most esoteric tech you’ve worked with” or “tell me about a project that taught you the most” are vastly superior conversation starters than meta-tag trivia.

rileymat2 5y ago

“ I know myself way better than any interviewer possibly can. If you don't trust me to evaluate myself, then you shouldn't be hiring me into a creative, professional, self-directed position.” I am not sure this is well grounded in the studies of human psychology.

munk-a 5y ago
I think it's extremely fair to not trust people to evaluate themselves when doing open hiring - for networked candidates you can usually relax some assumptions and for very senior/niche positions there's usually ample street knowledge available... but in these cases you're relying on a third party for some level of vetting. I would never solely trust a second party during hiring unless I had some method to confirm at least some of what they're saying. A lot of companies are far too hesitant to trust employees, but blind trust is unwise - you can end up with an employee that either wastes three months salary or actively causes damage.
- rileymat2 5y ago
  I think we may be talking about slightly different things. There is a ton of well researched psychology work on self deception, confirmation bias, it goes on and on. Asking about the things that the OP was mentioning are deep psychological traps. Perhaps the OP has deep self awareness, but that does not apply to the general candidate or human. Our blind spots of our own actions and behaviors are profound.