Putting people into immutable identity-like categories of "loser" and "winner" is gross, first off. People have worth outside of their utility to you or any emp

Putting people into immutable identity-like categories of "loser" and "winner" is gross, first off. People have worth outside of their utility to you or any employer. If they don't fit what you need from a worker right now then obviously don't hire them but why do you need to go around labeling people with this terminal fixed mindset-ass thing? Second and maybe more importantly: is it effective? Take those first questions for example, about college. The specific answers don't matter, but the candidate doesn't know that! I didn't go to college and honestly do have some professional shame around that. If you pick up on that are you going to read it correctly, or ascribe it to the loser behavior you're attempting to weed out? Or, > And the overly polished interviewees will struggle with these non-traditional questions if they are secretly losers. Do they? I feel like this is based on a stereotype on developers being uniquely introverted and incapable of social artifice, but that isn't true in my experience. The people I have worked with are a pretty normal crowd with about the same range of interests and inclinations you'd see in other groups too. I've known plenty of charismatic gregarious people who could talk engagingly about these questions or similar ones for hours. Some of those people are developers and some of them are not very good ones, so I don't find any inherent link here. Even stuff like asking about hobbies and interests outside of work can be revealing in ways candidates might not be willing to share in an interview. A close friend of mine would bomb this question because the thing that sits where his passion should is caring for his dying son. Another is a world-tier expert in a specific musical practice, one of a handful of people with this kind and degree of mastery. It's a practice limited to a specific religious minority so he's careful about bringing it up in professional contexts. It's impossible to come up with a perfect hiring process. Anything you do will allow some people through you wish it hadn't and exclude others you'd be better off if you didn't. I think careful thought is warranted about what those errors will look like for any specific hiring process, and I don't think this one is particularly valuable.