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You are selecting for the kind of person who always like to think about the war stories and brag about them.

• AnimalMuppet 2y ago
  No, they're selecting for the kind of person who can tell a war story when asked. They're also selecting for the kind of people who had to debug something gnarly enough and different enough that it was memorable.
  • kccqzy 2y ago
    Some people are not natural story tellers. Telling a story is not a usual part of the job responsibility of a software engineer—we aren't novelists. Having a memorable debugging experience doesn't directly equate to having a good story to tell. This is really the same issue with the promo culture we see at Big Tech companies: you end up promoting the people who are good at crafting promo packets i.e. telling stories about their work. There is certainly a good overlap between that and the people who do genuinely good work, but it's not a perfect overlap. Personally I don't really mind it because I consider myself good at story telling. But as an interviewer I would never do that to a candidate because not everyone can tell good stories.
• Suppafly 2y ago
  This, whenever I get these sorts of questions on interviews I don't know how to answer, because my weirdest or hardest bug isn't something I've internalized as a war story, it was just another day. It's just like those "what did you do when you had conflict with another employee" questions. I either worked it out with them like an adult or got our management involved and they worked it out for them. It's not some hero narrative I considered much past the time it happened.