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> “Tell me about you. If your life was a book, give me the chapter titles from your birth till now.” Once you’ve gotten the overview, dive into each “chapter” a
by bheadmaster 3y ago
> “Tell me about you. If your life was a book, give me the chapter titles from your birth till now.” Once you’ve gotten the overview, dive into each “chapter” and plumb the depths for their real stories. Go back to their childhood! I learn a lot about their grit and commitment to excellence from their basketball obsession or maybe their experience caring for a dying parent.
I don't think I'd be comfortable sharing this much personal information with a stranger on a job interview.
Additionally, it sounds more like a psychological evaluation, than evaluation of a person's potential at a job. I understand that maybe that's exactly the writer's intention, but I'd personally be wary of companies which ask questions like this.
- paulcole 3y ago> I don't think I'd be comfortable sharing this much personal information with a stranger on a job interview. Then lie and tell a good story.
- bheadmaster 3y agoGood point! Seems like the writer has accidentally optimized his interview for narcissists, psychopaths and pathological liers who excel at manipulation, instead of true high-potential young people :)
- paulcole 3y agoSix of one, half dozen of the other.
- Projectiboga 3y agoSo this is tuned to find the ideal corporate functionary.
- jjk7 3y agoAll interviews except hard technical ones are optimized for liars.
- klyrs 3y ago> Then lie and tell a good story. They'll review your story with your references; better hope your mom has a good sense of humor...
- paulcole 3y agoI mean yeah that's a risk. But get it pretty close and pick the right references.
- dinkleberg 3y agoYeah fuck that. Maybe those topics can come up after we’ve been working together for a while and have built up a strong rapport and trust (not a given). This feels totally inappropriate for an interview.
- duxup 3y ago>it sounds more like a psychological evaluation Ultimately if you're talking about who you work well with, how you deal with frustration, adversity and etc, that's sorta what you're talking about. I am not a big fan of some of the questions, but ultimately when we think of how humans work together, well or not, it's often a social thing.
- SketchySeaBeast 3y agoNone of my current co-workers, who I have now spent several years and get along perfectly well with, know about my childhood, and I will never tell them.
- notpachet 3y agoIt depends on the role you're hiring for. I suspect a lot of comments in this thread, echoing your sentiment, will be written from the perspective of sharp-end-of-the-stick engineers for whom the idea of working on ambiguous organizational problems is an abstract concept, far from their day to day. Not saying that's you per se, but this is HN after all. This crowd loves for things to be clear-cut, especially when they absolutely can't be. For roles that require discontinuous improvement to company process or culture, it's necessary to get a glimpse into how someone thinks, and the elements that went into building their worldview. You need to know how they will react under pressure to an extent that I think is largely irrelevant for a lot of engineering roles. In other words, the difference between a psychological evaluation of an individual and that individual's potential to do this sort of work becomes very muddy and indistinct. You want to have a picture of their psychology, because the problems you're hiring them for are often psychological in nature. This is not a popular opinion among engineering types; we like things arrayed in black and white, passing tests and failing tests. But that's naive.
- finnthehuman 3y agoI don’t think “oh haha aren’t engineers robotic personalities” applies here. Fucking nobody I know gives too much of their real personality at work, let alone when interviewing. But “haha aren’t all engineers only friends with other nerds and barely live in the real word” so what do I know?
- em-bee 3y agonobody I know gives too much of their real personality at work i don't believe that. are you claiming that they are all faking it? i would not want to work in a place where people fake their personality just to fit in. my experience from working on FOSS projects suggests that the stereotypical behavior we see in some engineers is in fact real. not as exaggerated as people claim, but the signs are there. more importantly however is that among engineers i feel there is less expectation to conform to some kind of normalized behavior or personality. at best, certain aspects of someones personality don't get an opportunity to show. say for example how someone cares for their family or animals, or volunteers in non-tech areas. an alternative interpretation of your statement would be that people do not show all of their personality at work, but only those aspects that are relevant for the work. and that is just what is needed. showing someones full personality at work is not what is expected here. a more negative side of this is that in some places certain aspects of a personality are being actively suppressed. say, calling out problems that hurt the company, or trying to be helpful to others (and possibly hurting your own performance because of it)
- pavel_lishin 3y ago> maybe their experience caring for a dying parent. Yeah, you would have to claw this out of me with a hammer. There's absolutely no way I would be comfortable sharing that level of intimacy with a stranger.
- zer00eyz 3y agoThat isnt everyone. Some folks had a lot of adversity in their lives and are OK with talking about how they delt with it. Some people pay others to listen to this and call it therapy. There are other ways to ask these sorts of questions: did you ever have a job that you dont want to go back to but would not give up the experience of? (Do you know how shitty a job can be, were you an amazon driver or a pickle shoveler) When they dont have that much experience you want to know that they can be mentored.
- em-bee 3y agotherapy vs sharing my experiences are very different things. when i am willing to talk to a therapist then it is because the therapist is not allowed to share that with others.
- AnimalMuppet 3y ago> That isnt everyone. > Some folks had a lot of adversity in their lives and are OK with talking about how they delt with it. Some people pay others to listen to this and call it therapy. Sure. But is "willing to talk about dealing with trauma" really a valid filter to sort potential employees by?
- eszed 3y agoAbility to function during emotionally-difficult circumstances can be a job requirement. (Likely not software engineering, hence the scorn on this forum!) It's unlikely the interviewers are curious about the interviewee's story, but if a question about a traumatic experience makes someone freeze up then they may not be able to perform certain roles.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- 5350-uiop-1130 3y ago"dance monkey dance!!" was hoping for something insightful... we are truly in the worst timeline.
- siva7 3y agoI'd quit such an interview. Those questions are going over the boundaries of a strictly professional relationship. The thing with low-experience, high-potentials is that they may be bit more insecure than seniors and therefore might think that such questions are normal which they are not.
- mmcgaha 3y agoI couldn't agree more. I am not sure if there is a name for the tactic but I had two girl friends that probed like that early on in our relationships and both times it turned out to bite me during and after our relationships. It is almost a cult-like tactic to get into someone's head.
- rqtwteye 3y agoExactly. You are joining a company, not a cult. Basically they are filtering for people who can speak the same jargon correctly. I have heard a lot of stories about people failing DEI questions during an interview because they didn't know the "correct" phrases to use.
- greesil 3y agoWho asks DEI questions? For engineering roles? As a sometimes hiring manager myself I'm genuinely curious.
- networkchad 3y ago[dead]
- rqtwteye 3y agoThe people I know were applying for roles at universities. Engineering and teaching. You basically have to memorize your response and not deviate from it or you may get in trouble.
- greesil 3y ago
- danielvaughn 3y agoI've noticed a trend where the lower the position, the more invasive the questions become. I think it's a power dynamic - they can ask the questions because they know the applicants are more desperate. For example, before I was an engineer, I was scraping by on odd jobs after the 2008 crash. Around that time I applied for a job at Red Robin (basically a fast food restaurant for those who don't know). One of the questions was a huge list of various types of people - a priest, a school teacher, a police officer, etc. There were like 50 of them. I had to rank them by how "moral" I considered them to be. Aside from that, there were a bunch of other pseudo-psychological questions that tried to gauge my personality. All for a job paying $8/hr at a fucking fast food restaurant.
- bombcar 3y agoThose are definitely interview questions "sold" to companies as being able to weed out undesirables (read: find the answers to questions they cannot ask because of anti-discrimination laws).
- tristor 3y agoI hope that stuff has stopped somewhat but it was definitely all the rage during the mid-late 2000s. I applied for Best Buy GeekSquad when I was starting my career and “failed” their stupid hour long online psych eval that was probably (or should be) illegal. Considering my intelligence and the trajectory of my career they would have been lucky to have me, but I am glad I didn’t get the job, so I would say these are red flags you don’t want to work there anyway.
- robocat 3y ago> I would say these are red flags you don’t want to work there anyway. That's kind of ignoring OP's point: people that are desperate for income will put up with abuse to get work. Of course they don't want to work there and the working conditions are often stink.
- yterdy 3y agoNope. Had to take one for BB, CVS, T-Mobile, as late as 2022.
- nineplay 3y agoThere's a nauseating bias here against people who've had horrific childhoods. "Let me tell you about the years of physical/emotional/sexual abuse I've suffered though." That's just not going to happen - and if it did happen the interviewer is probably not going to come away with "What a brave person to overcome all of that!" but "What a damaged person, I don't need them around". Well done, you've weeded out people who've already suffered enough.
- the_mar 3y agoThank you. I found the part where the author throws in "cared for a dying parent" particularly distasteful, it's like a benchmark for "palatable damage"
- garciasn 3y agoI could only see that being relevant when there are resume gaps that may be explained by being a SAHM or caring for a dying parent. But as it relates to actual work? No.
- the_mar 3y agoI was told that asking about resume gaps is a very biased question and a no-no, especially if it is a single gap, as opposed to a pattern. Usually the answer to a single resume gap is something personal and none of my business as an interviewer, it's not my place to pry if you were raising children, caring for dying relatives or battling severe depression
- nineplay 3y agoThat whole line of questioning is a HR nightmare and I don't think they'd get away with it in any large company. You are _not_ supposed to ask open ended questions that could reveal a candidate as a member of a protected group. They tell you that their parents kicked them out because they were gay, they don't get hired, and they file a lawsuit saying that there were forced to reveal their sexual orientation and they were discriminated against because of it. It'd be a pretty easy win.
- unshavedyak 3y agoYup. I had a rough childhood. Not something i'm exactly keen on diving into, let alone sharing. edit: Sidenote, i take real pride in knowing the little bit i contribute to our hiring process is nothing like this. Just help me understand if you know the tech i think you'll need to know. There's no gotcha questions, no arbitrary count questions you have to answer correctly to pass, etc.
- andix 3y agoI like the general idea of this article. But that question would be a huge red flag for me. That’s intrusive and I would consider such a question as offensive. But maybe this is a cultural thing, and works differently in other cultures (didn’t check where the author is from).
- hedora 3y agoThis sort of question reminds me of the now-discredited “cultural fit” question in standard interview rounds. In almost all situations, it meant “are you of the same socioeconomic background as the interviewer?”, so it ended up being incredibly racist and also ensured that teams had very little technical diversity. It did optimize for fun nights out with cliques within the teams (and epic political infighting) though.
- jmac01 3y agoAlmost anyone can solve problems. You want to find someone who you actually want to work with. The days of the anti social "lone genius" are long gone.
- yodsanklai 3y agoYes, this is creepy and would be a red flag for me too. People gives a lot of flak to big corps behing dehumazing and such, but at least they have standard processes and this type of BS is explicitly forbidden (well, at least where I worked).
- Scubabear68 3y agoAgree completely. This interview approach is going to lead to terrible biases coming to the forefront that have nothing to do with job performance. It also sounds like an HR nightmare in some states here in the US.
- kayodelycaon 3y agoIt's an HR nightmare in the entire country thanks to ADA. You really don't want to dig into someone's past and hit a mental health issue and then refusing to hire them because they didn't disclosure a disability to you.
- htrp 3y agoYou've never had to take a psych test before an interview?
- TylerE 3y agoThere's a difference between the results of a test and microanalysing the subject WHILE they're being tested.
- avgcorrection 3y agoIt’s revealing that the author feels entitled to the interviewee just volunteering such information for the sake of a job.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- tussa 3y agoMost people I know would walk out of that trainwreck of an interview.
- geonic 3y agoThis is highly inappropriate for a job interview at least in my country. You can’t ask these type of personal questions. Who would feel comfortable sharing this with a complete stranger anyway?
- lumost 3y agoThis sounds like a "Like me" bias in hiring. Your looking for someone with a similar "high potential" upbringing as what the interviewer had. You could likely get a similar interview outcome with less interviewer bias by filtering resumes based on school/major/GPA + (alternate activity) + a battery of behavioral/tech questions. It's desirable by many employers to have a recipe to identify candidates who are less desirable on paper, but equivalent in role.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- swozey 3y agoI was asked this question by (I believe) a very Christian burger company from Austin (Mighty Fine) at the start of my career interviewing for some sort of IT admin job with them. I think I was 22-25. He asked "So what extra curricular hobbies did you have in high school?" And I'll never forget that it was such a weird gross question to ask someone. What are you doing, judging whether I was in wrestling or theater? Judging if I didn't do any at all because I had to work after school? Judging if I took night classes and worked during the day? Judging if I'm not at christian school after class? Are you just being chatty and friendly? Weird question. I couldn't even remember. I DID play hockey and wrestle but I was so shocked by the question I didn't even think of those IIRC. Not sure what I said. Maybe I did say those and I'm misremembering because I'm not sure what else I would've said other than "no hobbies."
- web3-is-a-scam 3y agoI have a large gap in my resume from a bout of depression that left me basically incapacitated for nearly 10 months. I get asked about it all the time in interviews. I just respond “I’m under NDA”. I also get asked about GitHub profiles. I have a pseudonym on GitHub, and maintain a few projects. I dont divulge that information either. “I’m under NDA” or “I only work in proprietary code with many trade secrets involved so I can’t” I’ve probably been screened out of plenty of processes just for that, but I don’t care. I’ve been doing pretty good for myself without making my life an open book.
- lostlogin 3y agoIt’s heartening to read the article, pause at that section and then see this comment here. Is some random interviewer going to be able to make deep psychological assessment of future performance based on the response? Even actual psychologists don’t do that well at predicting an individual’s future course.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- myth_drannon 3y agoThat reminds me of Shopify's "Story of your life" interview. Tell me everything about your life, what did you like in elementary school? High school? Tell me all...
- zebraflask 3y ago+1 to the comments pointing out that these types of questions can easily veer into highly intrusive, if not overtly discriminatory, territory. This reminds me of LinkedIn pablum more than anything else.