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> I will note that I often wish Dan Luu was a bit less apparently-uniformly-confident in some of the statements he writes. He does back up what he says, but he'

> I will note that I often wish Dan Luu was a bit less apparently-uniformly-confident in some of the statements he writes. He does back up what he says, but he'll use the same tone for something he's seen anecdotally and something he's spent a month personally investigating. Dan Luu is one of my favorite currently-active bloggers. He's obviously a smart person with a good amount of experience in specific areas. However, I have to agree with your assessment. He has a tendency to present his personal anecdotes and perspective as the infallible ground truth and build elaborate essays and logic around it. I hesitate to talk about it because I think his blog is valuable, albeit if the reader can take it as one person's perspective rather than the absolute truth. The biggest example of this effect is his Twitter thread about his tendency to fail interviews ( https://twitter.com/danluu/status/1470890494775361538 https://twitter.com/danluu/status/1470890494775361538 ). He spends a lot of time bragging about arguing with interviewers, dodging questions instead of trying to provide answers, and how he's never written production code that talks to a DB, performs an RPC call, or connects to an API. It's not at all surprising that anyone would be struggle to pass interviews like this, but he seems incapable of accepting that maybe he's doing something wrong or that he's simply not a good fit for the jobs he applied for. Instead, his implied analysis is that the interviewers are simply wrong, and that they're making a mistake to ask him those questions and eventually decline him. The interview topic is especially challenging because blaming the interviewer is so very appealing to his audience of developers (who all abhor interviews and hate rejection even more). I think my disappointment comes from the fact that he's well-positioned to display some humility and teach some lessons about how someone can learn from their shortcomings, yet instead he uses his platform to further demonize his interviewers and make some worst-case assumptions about why he didn't get these jobs. I think the best way to read this blog, like any, is to remember that the author is just another person with another set of perspectives and opinions. There's a lot of value there, as long as you take it with a grain of salt and remain open to other lines of reasoning.

scaramanga 5y ago
I think that's kind of the point. Dan Luu can change his priorities to do a performative display of what interviewers expect and then Dan Luu can pass a job interview. In which case you are not hiring Dan Luu, but a different guy who has most likely internalised a different world-view and set of values. Even if you assume he can compartmentalize his interview performance skills, he will have at least devoted time to that, instead of to something "more useful". I don't think Dan Luu is struggling for work. So the question is do you want to hire someone like Dan Luu or not? If the answer is yes, then you might want to consider how your interview process might interact with such a person. If you are thinking from the perspective of someone doing the hiring (as those articles seem to be), it is nonsensical to simply respond by saying "well, the candidates just need to be more submissive and compliant to whatever our process is." Perhaps Dan Luu is a unique snowflake and/or nobody needs to hire someone like that. Or it could be that there are quite a large number of developers with attitudes and experience that lead to similarly unproductive or inefficient interactions with tech interview processes because those processes may be fixating on having the candidate do a specific performance rather than trying to understand what individuals can offer and whether that would be useful when added to the existing team. It could be that such developers would be as good or better fit, in a lot of cases, than people who can do oscar-winning interview performances.
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  > I think that's kind of the point. Dan Luu can change his priorities to do a performative display of what interviewers expect and then Dan Luu can pass a job interview. This is the problematic logic I was trying to highlight: It's written as though he's infallible. He knows the correct answers to the interview questions, but he also deduces what his interviewers are thinking and why they're wrong. The other possibility is that maybe the interviewers know what they're doing when they decline him, even when he answers the questions correctly. Interviews are about more than just reciting the correct answers to the questions, but he only discusses them as a sort of pass/fail quiz where the candidate is supposed to guess what the interviewer wants to hear. My perspective is likely quite different as a hiring manager. The part where he talks about Palantir walking him out the door despite correctly answering the questions as fast as they can deliver is the kind of thing that happens when the interviewers agree that someone is smart, but isn't a good fit for the team. If you do enough interviews, you eventually come across people far more brilliant and successful than yourself whom you would nevertheless not really see fitting into your company's work culture. Someone who openly boasts about dodging interview questions and debating interviewers because they think they can read the interviewer's mind (and they are wrong) fits this description. You know they'll do fantastic things somewhere, but they're not the kind of person you're looking for to fill the open position on your team. > I don't think Dan Luu is struggling for work. Neither do I! I never meant to imply as much. Dan posted the long Twitter thread over a period of several weeks, so it appeared in my timeline frequently. I only brought it up as an example of his writing style, not his career.
  - bryanrasmussen 5y ago
    I've not gotten the job offer from some interviews in which I aced the tech but in which I did not 'fit' (how do I know, well recruiters and people from company told me but also I knew, I often either breeze through interviews or I fail miserably and these I breezed) In one interview where I would have gotten it but didn't the reason was basically I wasn't submissive, the tech lead was in my opinion rude and so when he made some technical mistakes I pointed them out. Why did I do that? Because I did not need the job. If I had needed the job I would have been submissive. Perhaps a lot of interviews fail to hire Dan because the interview process is geared towards hiring someone who needs the job. Why is this? No idea, especially as lots of interviews take place with someone who already has a job and the new place wants to attract. But for some reason companies want to attract flies with vinegar and not honey, contra the old adage. on edit: regarding on why I did that, well I also did it because the lead was rude. Otherwise I wouldn't have pointed out when they were wrong.
civilized 5y ago
> He spends a lot of time bragging about arguing with interviewers, dodging questions instead of trying to provide answers, and how he's never written production code that talks to a DB, performs an RPC call, or connects to an API. I think describing what he's doing as "bragging" is fundamentally misreading him. He's just very honest, regardless of how people will perceive it. And he needs to work in environments where that trait will be perceived positively, because he feels it's not an option to turn it off. I'm sure that, for people who put up a social front as easily as they breathe, Dan's style can be viewed as simply a more elaborate social front, a form of peacocking that he feels he can get away with because of his technical skill. It's a weird world we live in, where being honest is viewed as the strangest, most exotic and elaborate conceit. > he seems incapable of accepting that maybe he's doing something wrong or that he's simply not a good fit for the jobs he applied for. Instead, his implied analysis is that the interviewers are simply wrong, and that they're making a mistake to ask him those questions and eventually decline him. In the thread you linked, he links another thread (https://twitter.com/danluu/status/1447268693075841024 https://twitter.com/danluu/status/1447268693075841024) where his interviewer was wrong. And what's fun about Dan Luu is, he actually cares about answering a question correctly more than he cares about the intense pressure to "play the game" - that is, to conform, be agreeable, and affirm the viewpoint of whoever has power in a situation so that they like him. He wants to work in a position where that tendency is valued. Sadly, it usually isn't. Personally I don't take it to the extreme he does, but I admire him for doing so. Sometimes there is nothing wrong with you; it is the world that's wrong. You can adapt to survive in that wrong world, sure, but that doesn't make the observation incorrect.
rjh29 5y ago
The most popular writers on this site (and others) have this habit of presenting their opinion as the ground truth and it annoys the heck out of me. There are VERY few things I can be confident about, I don't pretend to be that smart. Then you get people like Jordan Peterson who present a mix of truth and unsourced, unverifiable nonsense with the same confidence and charisma, who become thought leaders. Nobody is going to listen to the person saying "I'm not sure" or "I don't know".

scaramanga 5y ago

I think that's kind of the point. Dan Luu can change his priorities to do a performative display of what interviewers expect and then Dan Luu can pass a job interview. In which case you are not hiring Dan Luu, but a different guy who has most likely internalised a different world-view and set of values. Even if you assume he can compartmentalize his interview performance skills, he will have at least devoted time to that, instead of to something "more useful". I don't think Dan Luu is struggling for work. So the question is do you want to hire someone like Dan Luu or not? If the answer is yes, then you might want to consider how your interview process might interact with such a person. If you are thinking from the perspective of someone doing the hiring (as those articles seem to be), it is nonsensical to simply respond by saying "well, the candidates just need to be more submissive and compliant to whatever our process is." Perhaps Dan Luu is a unique snowflake and/or nobody needs to hire someone like that. Or it could be that there are quite a large number of developers with attitudes and experience that lead to similarly unproductive or inefficient interactions with tech interview processes because those processes may be fixating on having the candidate do a specific performance rather than trying to understand what individuals can offer and whether that would be useful when added to the existing team. It could be that such developers would be as good or better fit, in a lot of cases, than people who can do oscar-winning interview performances.

PragmaticPulp 5y ago
> I think that's kind of the point. Dan Luu can change his priorities to do a performative display of what interviewers expect and then Dan Luu can pass a job interview. This is the problematic logic I was trying to highlight: It's written as though he's infallible. He knows the correct answers to the interview questions, but he also deduces what his interviewers are thinking and why they're wrong. The other possibility is that maybe the interviewers know what they're doing when they decline him, even when he answers the questions correctly. Interviews are about more than just reciting the correct answers to the questions, but he only discusses them as a sort of pass/fail quiz where the candidate is supposed to guess what the interviewer wants to hear. My perspective is likely quite different as a hiring manager. The part where he talks about Palantir walking him out the door despite correctly answering the questions as fast as they can deliver is the kind of thing that happens when the interviewers agree that someone is smart, but isn't a good fit for the team. If you do enough interviews, you eventually come across people far more brilliant and successful than yourself whom you would nevertheless not really see fitting into your company's work culture. Someone who openly boasts about dodging interview questions and debating interviewers because they think they can read the interviewer's mind (and they are wrong) fits this description. You know they'll do fantastic things somewhere, but they're not the kind of person you're looking for to fill the open position on your team. > I don't think Dan Luu is struggling for work. Neither do I! I never meant to imply as much. Dan posted the long Twitter thread over a period of several weeks, so it appeared in my timeline frequently. I only brought it up as an example of his writing style, not his career.
- bryanrasmussen 5y ago
  I've not gotten the job offer from some interviews in which I aced the tech but in which I did not 'fit' (how do I know, well recruiters and people from company told me but also I knew, I often either breeze through interviews or I fail miserably and these I breezed) In one interview where I would have gotten it but didn't the reason was basically I wasn't submissive, the tech lead was in my opinion rude and so when he made some technical mistakes I pointed them out. Why did I do that? Because I did not need the job. If I had needed the job I would have been submissive. Perhaps a lot of interviews fail to hire Dan because the interview process is geared towards hiring someone who needs the job. Why is this? No idea, especially as lots of interviews take place with someone who already has a job and the new place wants to attract. But for some reason companies want to attract flies with vinegar and not honey, contra the old adage. on edit: regarding on why I did that, well I also did it because the lead was rude. Otherwise I wouldn't have pointed out when they were wrong.

civilized 5y ago

> He spends a lot of time bragging about arguing with interviewers, dodging questions instead of trying to provide answers, and how he's never written production code that talks to a DB, performs an RPC call, or connects to an API. I think describing what he's doing as "bragging" is fundamentally misreading him. He's just very honest, regardless of how people will perceive it. And he needs to work in environments where that trait will be perceived positively, because he feels it's not an option to turn it off. I'm sure that, for people who put up a social front as easily as they breathe, Dan's style can be viewed as simply a more elaborate social front, a form of peacocking that he feels he can get away with because of his technical skill. It's a weird world we live in, where being honest is viewed as the strangest, most exotic and elaborate conceit. > he seems incapable of accepting that maybe he's doing something wrong or that he's simply not a good fit for the jobs he applied for. Instead, his implied analysis is that the interviewers are simply wrong, and that they're making a mistake to ask him those questions and eventually decline him. In the thread you linked, he links another thread (https://twitter.com/danluu/status/1447268693075841024 https://twitter.com/danluu/status/1447268693075841024) where his interviewer was wrong. And what's fun about Dan Luu is, he actually cares about answering a question correctly more than he cares about the intense pressure to "play the game" - that is, to conform, be agreeable, and affirm the viewpoint of whoever has power in a situation so that they like him. He wants to work in a position where that tendency is valued. Sadly, it usually isn't. Personally I don't take it to the extreme he does, but I admire him for doing so. Sometimes there is nothing wrong with you; it is the world that's wrong. You can adapt to survive in that wrong world, sure, but that doesn't make the observation incorrect.

rjh29 5y ago

The most popular writers on this site (and others) have this habit of presenting their opinion as the ground truth and it annoys the heck out of me. There are VERY few things I can be confident about, I don't pretend to be that smart. Then you get people like Jordan Peterson who present a mix of truth and unsourced, unverifiable nonsense with the same confidence and charisma, who become thought leaders. Nobody is going to listen to the person saying "I'm not sure" or "I don't know".