6 ms·

I loved the article and would probably have hired this person. But as a suggestion to them: if an interviewer says "I don't think that will be a good idea" just

I loved the article and would probably have hired this person. But as a suggestion to them: if an interviewer says "I don't think that will be a good idea" just take the hint that it won't be what the expect and change it. Also reminded me of my compiler class, we had some homework to write a pascal/C transpiler and a friend of mine somehow managed to implement it via bison errors(?). The teacher was not happy but had to agree it worked and gave him full marks.

lowbloodsugar 2y ago
Interviewer was wrong however.
sjducb 2y ago
At work, would you rather have a boss that makes you implement dumb ideas? Or would you prefer a boss who recognises that your idea is better, then rewards you for it? You are interviewing them too. I would also have hired the candidate.
- tcbawo 2y ago
  The author’s answer was clever, but also unconventional. The company was probably looking for someone that would write code in a shared codebase that other developers will need to contribute to and maintain. Thinking outside the box and not following suggestions might have raised a red flag that this person might be a loose cannon. In a small company, hiring someone smart but unwilling to follow directions can be detrimental. Kudos to the author, though, for being quick thinking and creative.
  - xnickb 2y ago
    Then that expectation should be communicated clearly, not via some obscure passive aggressive subtones, don't you find?
    - a1j9o94 2y ago
      Ideally yes, but most people in corporate settings don't communicate clearly. So if they have a culture of dropping hints, and you don't take them you're not going to do well at the company. It's not good, but it's an accurate reflection of the work environment.
  - Angostura 2y ago
    Then don't say" "the interviewer noted that I could even use esoteric programming languages but advised me against because there would be lots of rules that would be hard to follow"
    - dijksterhuis 2y ago
      this is a good filter. if someone starts careening through the task using brainfuck, they ain’t thinking like a senior dev at day job i.e. simple, clear, easy to follow and maintainable code writing. i don’t care how clever you are. i need to know you’re not going to rewrite the frontend in your first week because of a “big brain” moment [0]. using python or something simple without being told to helps me feel like you won’t do that, and that i might be able to trust you on day 0. expectations on seniors are higher [0]: https://grugbrain.dev/ https://grugbrain.dev/
  - constantcrying 2y ago
    Then ask. Ask the candidate if he has experience in some teams, ask what he would do if someone else was challenging his technical decisions. Ask him what he would do if he was ordered to do something which he believes was a bad technical decision. Instead of talking the company relies on easily misinterpreted hints that he might or might not be someone able to work in a team. People can be both self confident and able to create a cheeky solution and be sociable people with decent team skills. If your hiring process relies on psycho analysis of the candidates, it probably will not work very well.
    - darkwater 2y ago
      Agree as a general rule BUT candidates can (and some WILL) lie to those questions. See how they react naturally although in a simulated scenario can give you a better idea. But you should do both things, probably in 2 different interviews.
      - bluGill 2y ago
        There is plenty of research on interviews and how to prevent them - or so the interview trainers hr made me take classes from before I was allowed to interview anyone. disscussions here universially show no evidence anyone knows it exists much less what it is. I at least know it evists but I don't know how to find it
      - phlakaton 2y ago
        I think the lie is in thinking FizzBuzz is going to give you any insight into such matters. Put aside your paranoia and just talk to your candidates. Ask them thoughtful questions that invite thoughtful answers. Probe gently to get at more challenging questions. Trust your ability to discern when they're BSing you.
    - yujzgzc 2y ago
      Even in the candidate's own telling, it is obvious that they misread very strong signals from interviewers. I've sometimes been that overly clever programmer and I've had to deal with it too, on the one side it's great that they bring energy and brains, but it is exhausting. At some point when moving fast you just want to have some people that you can go "hey just fix this bug wouldya" and trust that they're not going to come back with a clever but convoluted and inefficient hack.
  - bartread 2y ago
    Exactly. On one level I loved this solution but it’s definitely “clever code” and, unless there is a particularly strong requirement driving it (e.g., performance), I don’t particularly like clever code in production systems. The problem of “What does this do?” is prevalent enough, and occurs often enough under pressure, without adding excessive niftiness into the mix. I do still like the solution though.
  - makeitdouble 2y ago
    Yes. Also, this still properly fits the "you're interviewing the company as well" paradigm. If the author wanted a company that values cleverness or can deal with people who go unbeaten paths, they now know it wasn't the right place.
  - nmfisher 2y ago
    Normally I’d give the company the benefit of the doubt for the reasons you point out, but not in this case. If you’re asking increasingly convoluted/unrealistic/impractical questions, you can’t complain that the response wasn’t practical. It gives off strong “your answer might be correct but it’s not on my answer key so I’m marking you wrong” teacher vibes. Avoid at all costs.
  - whstl 2y ago
    The interview was also very clever and unconventional. "Numeric types, number literals and their associated methods and operations are forbidden". If this is how the interview behaved, I'm pretty sure this is a company that expects developers to write code in a certain way but doesn't really know how to guide them. Kudos to the author, but shame on the interviewer.
- Gee101 2y ago
  No point in dying on every hill. Sometimes letting people get their way today (even if you don't agree) could be long term win for you.
- strken 2y ago
  I probably wouldn't have hired the candidate, at least for the position as stated. My reasoning is that the company advertised a position for a senior engineer with 4 years experience. Leaving aside title inflation and whether someone with 4 years experience is actually a senior engineer, and leaving aside the really dumb test, that position requires communication skills, common sense, maturity, and just generally knowing what's going on. A candidate who misreads the situation in an interview so badly that they can't take the interviewer's unsubtle hints is going to mess up other communication within the company, has likely never been on the other side of an interview before, and is at risk of allowing the kind of "clever" code that destroys companies. Again, this is only a problem for a senior engineer. I want junior and mid-level engineers to be clever and enthusiastic. Senior engineers are meant to understand that I have five interviews this week and their attempt to channel Aphyr[0] is going to make my life harder when I want to talk about their thoughts on maintainability. [0] https://aphyr.com/posts/342-typing-the-technical-interview https://aphyr.com/posts/342-typing-the-technical-interview
  - phlakaton 2y ago
    If you want to assess communication skills, common sense, maturity, just generally knowing what's going on, or any other senior engineering quality, I advise you steer hard away from FizzBuzz. FizzBuzz is the mind-killer.
  - rbetts 2y ago
    The interesting contrast, though, is that the blog post demonstrates strong communication skills and self awareness.
    - Shocka1 2y ago
      Yeah I was thinking it was extremely well written. I want to be on their side after reading it, but I've encountered enough individuals that are completely different people online than how they are in real life. Especially in the way they communicate and how they speak. All that being said, I would not be able to take the OP's side until I heard the interviewers side of the story as well.
- skeeter2020 2y ago
  If you're building some sort of basic, crud app you shouldn't hire this candidate, or at least recognize they are a project - is that what you want? But if you're doing anything unique, or experimental they might be a great fit. Most of us are doing the second.
  - whstl 2y ago
    I mean, the interview requirements are quirky and unconventional as heck. Anyone saying "you gotta check divisibility without math" on the job would get laughed out of the room.
    - blharr 2y ago
      The only thing I can think of is they were fielding for them to say "that's not possible" and push back, potentially as a way to gauge if they would reject unreasonable client expectations or something.
      - joseda-hg 2y ago
        Then it's a stupid way to check for it, because it was possible and trivial enough to implement in a short time frame with a "rewrite" in the middle and no attempt to meassure pushing back in other ways when the first one failed
        blharr 2y ago
        Yea still absolutely unreasonable, but it's the only way it even makes sense for me
      - whstl 2y ago
        Possible but risky in an interview. Some people are really unreasonable.
qsort 2y ago
> if an interviewer says "I don't think that will be a good idea" just take the hint that it won't be what the expect and change it. I'd like to underline this just in case the author reads the thread. He really does seem great and I wish all the best to him, but reading between the lines is a useful skill regardless of this specific situation. He says he doesn't speak English well, that might have played a role in the misunderstanding, but "I don't think that will be a good idea" is not a suggestion, it's an order.
- xnickb 2y ago
  Smells like poor management to me. "We'd like you to explore this path and show how you would deal with problems that occur there" is much easier to interpret than the passive aggressive tone of "I don't think .." I would also go with my idea and see how the manager reacted: there is only so much micromanagement I'm willing to tolerate at work. Interviews go both ways.
- 317070 2y ago
  Yeah, it's an English thing. A literal translation in Dutch would mean "explain yourself here", and if you'd change tack because of the question alone, it would seem like you really lack self-confidence. But after living in the UK for a bit, in the UK that is most likely an order.
  - vkou 2y ago
    > and if you'd change tack because of the question alone, it would seem like you really lack self-confidence. Or because the candidate realized that they've messed up, and by dropping the issue can at least salvage the next XY minutes of the interview by not going down the wrong rabbit hole. "Could you tell me more about this?" and "Are you sure about this?" are invitations for providing the rationalization for your answers. "I'm not sure that's a good idea" is a very unsubtle, but polite way of hinting that the you have gone way off the map. As an interviewer, I want my candidates to succeed. I want them to put their best foot forward. I've asked my question over a hundred times, and I've seen many ways that people have solved it, correctly or no. If I'm giving them this suggestion, it means that I know that they are going down one of the many, many wrong garden paths.
hahn-kev 2y ago
Yeah I agree. You should be demonstrating how you would write code in the job. Based on devs I've worked with, I don't think a pure type solution as presented is very maintainable.
- XorNot 2y ago
  On the job I don't have lines of code restrictions, and can use math functions.
- whstl 2y ago
  > You should be demonstrating how you would write code in the job That was forbidden, check the rules given by the interviewer.
gota 2y ago
> would probably have hired this person Of course. They can write (as in, natural language, not "just" code). In my opinion always the second most important skill for every knowledge worker, regardless of what their actual job is
raffraffraff 2y ago
There is a power imbalance between interviewer and interviewee. If an interviewer really wants to, they can throw you the equivalent of "what number am I thinking of" and watch you struggle through 50 tries before your brain runs out of glucose and you go blank. If I'm interviewing someone and they give me a right answer that wasn't even in my copy of "the teacher's answer book", I realise they're good and let them ace it. It maybe be that there was a personality clash and they simply didn't think the candidate was a good fit for the team. Been there, and understand that. Or they maybe got butt-hurt that the candidate's answer broke their test. Either way, the candidate is better off not working there.
prinny_ 2y ago
But it was a good idea! The interviewer just didn't expect a rock solid idea on the OP's part. It seems the interviewer was more interested in creating a hard interview rather than finding a good engineer. And while we're on that, I firmly believe that giving a business-agnostic pull request "spiked" with errors, brad practices and tricky to find bugs and asking the interviewing party to review it is going to tell you much more about them than leetcode-interviewing them.
joshstrange 2y ago
> But as a suggestion to them: if an interviewer says "I don't think that will be a good idea" just take the hint that it won't be what the expect and change it. Yep, as an interviewer I hated when I’d try to gently (then not so gently) nudge a candidate in a direction because I could see they were going down the wrong path and they insisted they knew best or refused to listen to my advice. I’m not looking for “loyal foot soldiers” who follow my every order, and I’m not looking for people to kiss my butt or blow smoke up it, but the audacity to push back on an interviewer multiple times when they’re trying to help you… (NOT what I think happened in the OPs case, I’m thinking of my own experience here). For me it was a massive red flag. If I can’t get you to listen to my advice in a scenario where most people are trying their hardest to be “attractive” to a company then what’s going to happen when I ask you to change something in a PR? Or tell you that the approach you are taking is not going to work? That and the person who argued with me about tabs and spaces after I made a joke about it and then proceeded to email me with more sources as to why one was better than the other. Honestly, this person was younger and I don’t think they meant to be so abrasive, but it came across very “know-it-all” and one thing I don’t like is people who come into a company and start trying to change things or do things “their way” without first getting the lay of the land and understanding _why_ things were done the way they were (aka Chesterton's Fence).
joeevans1000 2y ago
Then you'll be coding what they expect for the next 10 years. Interviews are two way things.

lowbloodsugar 2y ago

Interviewer was wrong however.

sjducb 2y ago

At work, would you rather have a boss that makes you implement dumb ideas? Or would you prefer a boss who recognises that your idea is better, then rewards you for it? You are interviewing them too. I would also have hired the candidate.

tcbawo 2y ago
The author’s answer was clever, but also unconventional. The company was probably looking for someone that would write code in a shared codebase that other developers will need to contribute to and maintain. Thinking outside the box and not following suggestions might have raised a red flag that this person might be a loose cannon. In a small company, hiring someone smart but unwilling to follow directions can be detrimental. Kudos to the author, though, for being quick thinking and creative.
- xnickb 2y ago
  Then that expectation should be communicated clearly, not via some obscure passive aggressive subtones, don't you find?
  - a1j9o94 2y ago
    Ideally yes, but most people in corporate settings don't communicate clearly. So if they have a culture of dropping hints, and you don't take them you're not going to do well at the company. It's not good, but it's an accurate reflection of the work environment.
- Angostura 2y ago
  Then don't say" "the interviewer noted that I could even use esoteric programming languages but advised me against because there would be lots of rules that would be hard to follow"
  - dijksterhuis 2y ago
    this is a good filter. if someone starts careening through the task using brainfuck, they ain’t thinking like a senior dev at day job i.e. simple, clear, easy to follow and maintainable code writing. i don’t care how clever you are. i need to know you’re not going to rewrite the frontend in your first week because of a “big brain” moment [0]. using python or something simple without being told to helps me feel like you won’t do that, and that i might be able to trust you on day 0. expectations on seniors are higher [0]: https://grugbrain.dev/ https://grugbrain.dev/
- constantcrying 2y ago
  Then ask. Ask the candidate if he has experience in some teams, ask what he would do if someone else was challenging his technical decisions. Ask him what he would do if he was ordered to do something which he believes was a bad technical decision. Instead of talking the company relies on easily misinterpreted hints that he might or might not be someone able to work in a team. People can be both self confident and able to create a cheeky solution and be sociable people with decent team skills. If your hiring process relies on psycho analysis of the candidates, it probably will not work very well.
  - darkwater 2y ago
    Agree as a general rule BUT candidates can (and some WILL) lie to those questions. See how they react naturally although in a simulated scenario can give you a better idea. But you should do both things, probably in 2 different interviews.
    - bluGill 2y ago
      There is plenty of research on interviews and how to prevent them - or so the interview trainers hr made me take classes from before I was allowed to interview anyone. disscussions here universially show no evidence anyone knows it exists much less what it is. I at least know it evists but I don't know how to find it
    - phlakaton 2y ago
      I think the lie is in thinking FizzBuzz is going to give you any insight into such matters. Put aside your paranoia and just talk to your candidates. Ask them thoughtful questions that invite thoughtful answers. Probe gently to get at more challenging questions. Trust your ability to discern when they're BSing you.
  - yujzgzc 2y ago
    Even in the candidate's own telling, it is obvious that they misread very strong signals from interviewers. I've sometimes been that overly clever programmer and I've had to deal with it too, on the one side it's great that they bring energy and brains, but it is exhausting. At some point when moving fast you just want to have some people that you can go "hey just fix this bug wouldya" and trust that they're not going to come back with a clever but convoluted and inefficient hack.
- bartread 2y ago
  Exactly. On one level I loved this solution but it’s definitely “clever code” and, unless there is a particularly strong requirement driving it (e.g., performance), I don’t particularly like clever code in production systems. The problem of “What does this do?” is prevalent enough, and occurs often enough under pressure, without adding excessive niftiness into the mix. I do still like the solution though.
- makeitdouble 2y ago
  Yes. Also, this still properly fits the "you're interviewing the company as well" paradigm. If the author wanted a company that values cleverness or can deal with people who go unbeaten paths, they now know it wasn't the right place.
- nmfisher 2y ago
  Normally I’d give the company the benefit of the doubt for the reasons you point out, but not in this case. If you’re asking increasingly convoluted/unrealistic/impractical questions, you can’t complain that the response wasn’t practical. It gives off strong “your answer might be correct but it’s not on my answer key so I’m marking you wrong” teacher vibes. Avoid at all costs.
- whstl 2y ago
  The interview was also very clever and unconventional. "Numeric types, number literals and their associated methods and operations are forbidden". If this is how the interview behaved, I'm pretty sure this is a company that expects developers to write code in a certain way but doesn't really know how to guide them. Kudos to the author, but shame on the interviewer.
Gee101 2y ago
No point in dying on every hill. Sometimes letting people get their way today (even if you don't agree) could be long term win for you.
strken 2y ago
I probably wouldn't have hired the candidate, at least for the position as stated. My reasoning is that the company advertised a position for a senior engineer with 4 years experience. Leaving aside title inflation and whether someone with 4 years experience is actually a senior engineer, and leaving aside the really dumb test, that position requires communication skills, common sense, maturity, and just generally knowing what's going on. A candidate who misreads the situation in an interview so badly that they can't take the interviewer's unsubtle hints is going to mess up other communication within the company, has likely never been on the other side of an interview before, and is at risk of allowing the kind of "clever" code that destroys companies. Again, this is only a problem for a senior engineer. I want junior and mid-level engineers to be clever and enthusiastic. Senior engineers are meant to understand that I have five interviews this week and their attempt to channel Aphyr[0] is going to make my life harder when I want to talk about their thoughts on maintainability. [0] https://aphyr.com/posts/342-typing-the-technical-interview https://aphyr.com/posts/342-typing-the-technical-interview
- phlakaton 2y ago
  If you want to assess communication skills, common sense, maturity, just generally knowing what's going on, or any other senior engineering quality, I advise you steer hard away from FizzBuzz. FizzBuzz is the mind-killer.
- rbetts 2y ago
  The interesting contrast, though, is that the blog post demonstrates strong communication skills and self awareness.
  - Shocka1 2y ago
    Yeah I was thinking it was extremely well written. I want to be on their side after reading it, but I've encountered enough individuals that are completely different people online than how they are in real life. Especially in the way they communicate and how they speak. All that being said, I would not be able to take the OP's side until I heard the interviewers side of the story as well.
skeeter2020 2y ago
If you're building some sort of basic, crud app you shouldn't hire this candidate, or at least recognize they are a project - is that what you want? But if you're doing anything unique, or experimental they might be a great fit. Most of us are doing the second.
- whstl 2y ago
  I mean, the interview requirements are quirky and unconventional as heck. Anyone saying "you gotta check divisibility without math" on the job would get laughed out of the room.
  - blharr 2y ago
    The only thing I can think of is they were fielding for them to say "that's not possible" and push back, potentially as a way to gauge if they would reject unreasonable client expectations or something.
    - joseda-hg 2y ago
      Then it's a stupid way to check for it, because it was possible and trivial enough to implement in a short time frame with a "rewrite" in the middle and no attempt to meassure pushing back in other ways when the first one failed
      - blharr 2y ago
        Yea still absolutely unreasonable, but it's the only way it even makes sense for me
    - whstl 2y ago
      Possible but risky in an interview. Some people are really unreasonable.

qsort 2y ago

> if an interviewer says "I don't think that will be a good idea" just take the hint that it won't be what the expect and change it. I'd like to underline this just in case the author reads the thread. He really does seem great and I wish all the best to him, but reading between the lines is a useful skill regardless of this specific situation. He says he doesn't speak English well, that might have played a role in the misunderstanding, but "I don't think that will be a good idea" is not a suggestion, it's an order.

xnickb 2y ago
Smells like poor management to me. "We'd like you to explore this path and show how you would deal with problems that occur there" is much easier to interpret than the passive aggressive tone of "I don't think .." I would also go with my idea and see how the manager reacted: there is only so much micromanagement I'm willing to tolerate at work. Interviews go both ways.
317070 2y ago
Yeah, it's an English thing. A literal translation in Dutch would mean "explain yourself here", and if you'd change tack because of the question alone, it would seem like you really lack self-confidence. But after living in the UK for a bit, in the UK that is most likely an order.
- vkou 2y ago
  > and if you'd change tack because of the question alone, it would seem like you really lack self-confidence. Or because the candidate realized that they've messed up, and by dropping the issue can at least salvage the next XY minutes of the interview by not going down the wrong rabbit hole. "Could you tell me more about this?" and "Are you sure about this?" are invitations for providing the rationalization for your answers. "I'm not sure that's a good idea" is a very unsubtle, but polite way of hinting that the you have gone way off the map. As an interviewer, I want my candidates to succeed. I want them to put their best foot forward. I've asked my question over a hundred times, and I've seen many ways that people have solved it, correctly or no. If I'm giving them this suggestion, it means that I know that they are going down one of the many, many wrong garden paths.

hahn-kev 2y ago

Yeah I agree. You should be demonstrating how you would write code in the job. Based on devs I've worked with, I don't think a pure type solution as presented is very maintainable.

XorNot 2y ago
On the job I don't have lines of code restrictions, and can use math functions.
whstl 2y ago
> You should be demonstrating how you would write code in the job That was forbidden, check the rules given by the interviewer.

gota 2y ago

> would probably have hired this person Of course. They can write (as in, natural language, not "just" code). In my opinion always the second most important skill for every knowledge worker, regardless of what their actual job is

raffraffraff 2y ago

There is a power imbalance between interviewer and interviewee. If an interviewer really wants to, they can throw you the equivalent of "what number am I thinking of" and watch you struggle through 50 tries before your brain runs out of glucose and you go blank. If I'm interviewing someone and they give me a right answer that wasn't even in my copy of "the teacher's answer book", I realise they're good and let them ace it. It maybe be that there was a personality clash and they simply didn't think the candidate was a good fit for the team. Been there, and understand that. Or they maybe got butt-hurt that the candidate's answer broke their test. Either way, the candidate is better off not working there.

prinny_ 2y ago

But it was a good idea! The interviewer just didn't expect a rock solid idea on the OP's part. It seems the interviewer was more interested in creating a hard interview rather than finding a good engineer. And while we're on that, I firmly believe that giving a business-agnostic pull request "spiked" with errors, brad practices and tricky to find bugs and asking the interviewing party to review it is going to tell you much more about them than leetcode-interviewing them.

joshstrange 2y ago

> But as a suggestion to them: if an interviewer says "I don't think that will be a good idea" just take the hint that it won't be what the expect and change it. Yep, as an interviewer I hated when I’d try to gently (then not so gently) nudge a candidate in a direction because I could see they were going down the wrong path and they insisted they knew best or refused to listen to my advice. I’m not looking for “loyal foot soldiers” who follow my every order, and I’m not looking for people to kiss my butt or blow smoke up it, but the audacity to push back on an interviewer multiple times when they’re trying to help you… (NOT what I think happened in the OPs case, I’m thinking of my own experience here). For me it was a massive red flag. If I can’t get you to listen to my advice in a scenario where most people are trying their hardest to be “attractive” to a company then what’s going to happen when I ask you to change something in a PR? Or tell you that the approach you are taking is not going to work? That and the person who argued with me about tabs and spaces after I made a joke about it and then proceeded to email me with more sources as to why one was better than the other. Honestly, this person was younger and I don’t think they meant to be so abrasive, but it came across very “know-it-all” and one thing I don’t like is people who come into a company and start trying to change things or do things “their way” without first getting the lay of the land and understanding _why_ things were done the way they were (aka Chesterton's Fence).

joeevans1000 2y ago

Then you'll be coding what they expect for the next 10 years. Interviews are two way things.