9 ms·

Riddles have no place in job interviews

95 points by techdog 14y ago

ianstallings 14y ago
This is not a trivial career so why trivialize it? I'm more keen on seeing a person's past work or hearing about their experiences. Asking them how they've solved past problems and how they've faced past conflicts gives me insight into if we can start working together. That's all an interview is. There's no guarantees it will all work out and I believe no amount of interviewing techniques will change that.
raganwald 14y ago
The objective arguments are sound, in my opinion. I don't care for the flippant insults like "assholery," but I'm a big boy, I can filter these out. One thing to remember about interviewers that ask poor questions is that many such people aren't full-time professional interviewers. They are to interviewing as a marketing manager who does some Excel scripting is to programming. They are often repeating what they've heard or read or been subjected to, much as an inexperienced programmer tends to use whatever programming pattern was espoused in the last blog post he read. A terrible interviewer may still be a wonderful person to work alongside, just as someone who performs poorly under the pressure of an interview may be a fantastic programmer once hired and working on an actual project.
- jiggy2011 14y ago
  This. Also bear in mind that it is widely publicised that google and MS etc use these sorts of puzzles in their hiring process (whether or not this is true I have no idea). So there's a certain element of "if it's good enough for.."
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
  - Cookingboy 14y ago
    Both Google and MS have banned such riddles from their interviews, because they have been proven to be ineffective and results in large numbers of both false-negatives and false-positives.
    - hackinthebochs 14y ago
      Source?
      - Cookingboy 14y ago
        Documented source? I don't think companies publish their interview processes. Personal sources? The guy who interviewed me at MS a couple years ago told me himself, I also currently work for Google.
        hackinthebochs 14y ago
        I mean source that they result in a lot of false negatives and false positives. If Google kept stats on the rating engineers got during the interview and how they went on to do at the company, this would be a good starting point for objective evidence.
        badgar 14y ago
        And exactly why on Earth would any company ever created publish such detailed information?
        hackinthebochs 14y ago
        In aggregate, I don't see what harm it would cause. It would help move the industry forward.
        Firehed 14y ago
        I don't have a source for this, but as an interviewer, simply thinking about what I can get from a riddle indicates it's probably true. I have a mental checklist of about fifteen items that I try to get answered when interviewing a candidate, and asking riddles would barely if at all help me answer any of them. That's not to say they're worthless, but when I have an hour or so to interview a candidate, they're not an effective use of my time (and I imagine that most candidates would think it's a lousy use of their time, too) - I ask questions that can answer four or five items on my list, not one if I'm lucky.
  - majormajor 14y ago
    Seems like that was only true in the past. I've even had a Google interviewer tell me something along the lines of "I don't have a lot of questions picked out ahead of time cause they've told me I can't ask puzzles anymore" so hopefully that new state of things will trickle down in time.
  - endtime 14y ago
    Google and Microsoft don't ask those kinds of questions. Both of them primarily ask questions related to algorithms and data structures, sometimes with a bit of software design thrown in. Source: I work for Google and have interned for Microsoft.
  - varelse 14y ago
    Not anymore (previous googler)... My google interview was the best part of the whole time there to be honest. If the work had lived up to the people and problems presented in the interview, I would still be there, happy as a clam. Instead, it was a complete forced bait and switch onto a team doing something irrelevant to my skill set, which is my way of saying there are plenty of problems with Google, but this is not one of them.
    - notmyhnname 14y ago
      I've heard this a couple times now, and it worries me. I've got an on-site interview with Google soon, and my impression from the recruiter is that I would know which team I was joining at the offer stage. Can you go into some detail on what happened between your offer and joining Google that resulted in you feeling like it was a "bait and switch"? If it matters, I am not interviewing as a college hire, but as a senior engineer from another large tech company.
      - outside1234 14y ago
        A lot of people interview thinking they are going to work on Google Glasses and then get allocated to corporate IT. You don't know your role at the company until the day you start.
        notmyhnname 14y ago
        Yes, I suppose what I'm looking for is where exactly things go awry. Again, the impression I'd gotten from my recruiter is that I'd have more or less a commitment from Google that I'd be working on a particular team at the offer stage. In particular, that I'd know which team I was going to work on when I accepted the offer. So it seems like either she's exaggerated that (in which case I would expect it to seem fairly obvious at the offer stage that you weren't yet assigned to a team), or that Google is in the habit of outright lying about team assignments, which I have a hard time buying.
        varelse 14y ago
- crusso 14y ago
  someone who performs poorly under the pressure of an interview may be a fantastic programmer once hired and working on an actual project Maybe. But then again if I have one spot open for the quarter then I'm probably not going to take the chance on someone who crumbles when asked how to get the duck safely across the river or whatever.
  - waterlesscloud 14y ago
    And if a good programmer has a choice of employers (and they do), they probably aren't going to take a chance on someone whose idea of evaluating their skills is to ask how to get a duck across a river.
    - crusso 14y ago
      If that's the only thing asked during the interview then I might agree with you. It really never is, though, is it? Seriously, do you really want to work with someone who's too uptight to answer a couple of harmless riddles during the course of the interview process that includes a host of different methods for transferring information?
      - crosvenir 14y ago
        Yes, I do. Too many times I've worked with programmers that were pushovers to inane edicts from management, whereas if just a few had said, "I see what you're trying to do, can we accomplish this in a more efficient manner by ..."
    - mikecane 14y ago
      How many ducks are you dealing with in a day?
      - crusso 14y ago
        I'm way too embarrassed to say.
  - radley 14y ago
- groby_b 14y ago
  Why, it's almost like you should have programmers program during an interview. A previous company I worked for did that. Build a small ad-hoc team of 3-4 people (with 1-2 existing employees, as knowledge repositories), and let the candidates work on a sort-of real problem for pretty much a day. Every team member occasionally came in and watched for a while, every team member looked at the repo for the end results, and the "embedded" people gave feedback on how it felt to work with the candidates. Yes, it's expensive. But so is a mishire, and it sure did work well to filter people out.
jiggy2011 14y ago
Surely all of these arguments boil down to balancing how important general intelligence vs domain expertise is to your hiring procedure. You could see these riddles as a stand in for just giving the candidate a full blown IQ test.
- machrider 14y ago
  You're assuming that the ability to solve one specific riddle (on the spot) is a reliable indicator of general intelligence.
  - jiggy2011 14y ago
    Well, ideally you would have a test consisting of several riddles that was constructed by a psychologist who is an expert in IQ and g. Another proxy that is often used here is "Do you have a good degree in a difficult subject from a prestigious university?".
    - rhizome 14y ago
      ...which is a similarly unreliable indicator.
      - jiggy2011 14y ago
        How so? You can certainly unintentionally filter out smart people who didn't go to college (or went to a less prestigious college) by this method. However I imagine people who fit the description of "dumb guy who fluked his way through MIT math programme with a high GPA" are a pretty endangered species.
        rhizome 14y ago
        For the purposes of a given job, let alone the types of jobs discussed in these threads, it's going to dump a bunch of false negatives. Since software is an industry that thrives on overqualified employees, this may not seem like a big deal, but having people who can interview a Big Degree person such that they'll accept these jobs has its own cost and management overhead.
melvinmt 14y ago
It's funny to see that developers have so much leverage on the job market that you can read phrases like "don't hire this employer, you're better than that" and act like that's the most normal thing in the world. I guess it's time for having paid interviews again.
- runarb 14y ago
  When you think about all the time and care most developers will spend on there jobs one should be picky. It is literally one of your life's most important decisions.
  - sergiotapia 14y ago
    Hear, hear. The good software engineers are worth the money; they care about your product and apply years of expertise.
- mattgreenrocks 14y ago
  Funny? That's a little closer to how it should be. I'm so sick of the fear-saturated drivel that dominates much of 'common wisdom' surrounding employment: "dont' do this! don't do that! They may not like you!" It's disgusting and emasculating to constantly be told that we have to neuter ourselves into this docile, submissive employee because otherwise our boss might decide he doesn't like us.
- mikeash 14y ago
  Employers say that about candidates all the time. Why should it be a one-way thing?
Macsenour 14y ago
Having spent the last year interviewing for jobs. It has become clear to me that companies have no idea that they're being interviewed as they are interviewing me. Can't find a time to call me when I've given you 5 dates and times? Red flag. Can't get my resume into the hands of the folks who are interviewing me? Red Flag. Tell me it will be a week and it takes two? Red Flag. Call me 30 minutes after the scheduled time and not apologize. Red Flag. Tell me I'm a perfect fit for the job, then the HR person calls me 5 minutes later to say that they will not be moving forward with the interview process. Red Flag. Set up a time to Skype call me, cancel hours before the call, send an email 2 days later saying the job was filled before my interview. Black listed Tell me on the phone interview that I will be called in for the face to face, send me an email 2 weeks later saying the job was filled. Black listed Delay the hiring process because you want to hire another position first. Red Flag. I could go on, and all of this has happened in the last year.
- pyre 14y ago
  | Tell me it will be a week and it takes two? Red Flag. The thing that frustrated me the most about dealing with DeviantArt's interview process. No specific timelines, and 'soon' could mean anything from a couple of days to 3-4 weeks (with no response / contact).
- kscaldef 14y ago
  Are your "black lists" based on poor communication, or making an offer to another candidate while they haven't interviewed you yet?
  - Macsenour 14y ago
    The difference between a Red Flag and a Black List, is that a Red Flag I might forgive given circumstances. A Black List means I'll never apply again, and often call or email to remove my resume from their database.
    - kscaldef 14y ago
      That didn't actually answer my question, which was about what the reason for that being a "black list" offense was.
ig1 14y ago
I'm not sure the author understands the difference between a riddle and a logic problem, a riddle typically uses misdirection and veiled meanings to hide an answer while a logic problem is one that can be solve by applying logical analysis. So for example "What has two heads, four eyes, six legs and a tail?" is a riddle because it's so open ended and relies upon linguistic trickery. On the other hand most bridge crossing problems are logic problems, you typically have a finite number of options and by deduction and logical analysis you can arrive at the correct answer (i.e the answer is not a trick answer). The advantage of logic problems as opposed to domain specific problems is that they let you separate an individuals logical reasoning ability from their experience. When you're hiring you want to make sure that the person you're hiring can deal not only with more general problems of the type they've seen before, but also that they can deal with esoteric problems that are very specific to the nature of your product. And that's when the ability to reason logically becomes much more important. Obviously if the candidate you're interviewing is already familiar with the logic problem you're presenting then you probably won't get much value from the candidates answer and you need to ask alternative questions to ascertain the same information.
- jfoutz 14y ago
  Two lettuces each impaled with two needles, running a six stage race, being chased by a private investigator.
icedchai 14y ago
The worst company I ever worked at (now out of business, fortunately) had an interviewer / hiring manager who asked these sorts of riddles. He also had a really thick accent. Later, he also proved to be technically incompetent. I quit after 6 months.
- kscaldef 14y ago
  What did his accent have to do with the rest of this?
  - jlgreco 14y ago
    I assume he is implying that the technical incompetence caused people to second-guess what they heard when confusion arose. This confusion can be misunderstood by the interviewer as confusion over the subject matter. I know I've had that problem before over poor telephone connections.
  - pekk 14y ago
    People who have any kind of trouble communicating verbally with normal native speakers of the language in which business is to be transacted, are not a great choice for jobs which require clear communication.
  - icedchai 14y ago
    People who are poor communicators should generally not be in leadership positions. It actually wasn't just the accent, as his written English was absolutely awful, too.
waivej 14y ago
It makes me want to ask an interviewer to code a solution to fizzbuzz or solve a riddle.
- pyre 14y ago
  Maybe you should! You should be interviewing them as much as they are interviewing you. When they ask if you have any questions for them, respond with, "Could you solve this for me?" Then give them a programming problem. If you're being interviewed by a non-technical person (who obviously can't program), that could be a red flag right there (in and of itself).
- runarb 14y ago
  Good idea! Draw them the "Thinking outside the box"[1] puzzle or something. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking_outside_the_box http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking_outside_the_box
- danielweber 14y ago
  If I am interviewing you, I wouldn't mind you giving me a puzzle. Depending on how you do it, I would think you are either the world's biggest asshole, or a very easy guy to work with, and that's very valuable information.
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apalmer 14y ago
First off I am not really pro riddle per say, however we do use some 'riddles' at my current employer. 1) Sometimes they can point out really big gaping holes in basic logic ability, for instance we ask about basic logic with the NAND gate riddle, we explain you can compose the common logical operations just using NAND. Ask the interviewee to construct NOT using NAND, usually if they have never seen anything like this, we walk em through it as a freebie... so now they have NOT and NAND, and we ask them to construct AND. How many Architects we have interviewed, with 10+ years of experience who could not logically figure out how to combine NOT and NOTAND to get a logical AND... 2) Second, we mostly dont actually care too much about getting the correct answers to the riddles. Its partially to look at the way person solves problems, but mostly its psychological. In software dealing with non tech, high level biz people, you get all kinds of bizarre requests. If you throw a hissy fit in the middle of an interview, or storm out because someone asks you a riddle... Are we to expect you to keep your head when the VP of Sales asks you for something 'crazy'?
freework 14y ago
The same can be applied to pre-interview screening problems as well. I recently send my resume to a company that was advertising on the Hacker New job board (I'm not going to say which company it was). They replied to my email telling me that in order to get to the next step in the process, I need to solve a problem and send them my code. They wanted me to send them a conway's game of life board that, after 1000 generations, could be converted to a GIF and would make up a black and white image they included in the email. Basically they wanted me to take their image, convert it to a conway game of life board, and then figure out how to calculate backwards game of life generations. Sounds to me like a fools errand. I deleted the email and never thought about it again. I have better things to do to fill up my free time. Maybe if they had me do something actually useful or meaningful...
- brown9-2 14y ago
  That doesn't sound like a "riddle" to me. It sounds like a programming task, although one which might not be directly relevant to a lot of domains.
- nollidge 14y ago
  That sounds like a fun challenge, and if it's at all representative of the sorts of problems they take on, I'd love to know who the company was so I can apply.
  - freework 14y ago
    The fist task is converting the GIF into a data structure. That could take anywhere between one hour and one day. Since I personally have no experience reading data from GIF files, it is probably going to take me one day. The next step is to figure out how to reverse generate conway's game of life. If you have previous game of life experience, you may already know how to do that. But I'm not a game of life expert. Its going to take quite a bit of research and trial and error to get that working. It will probably take me at least a day. It all boils down to this: I don't want to waste two days of programming time for something as pointless as this. Especially since they could very easily say "sorry you're not a cultural fit" after spending all that time. Thats actually what happened to me a few months ago when I spent 4 days doing a programming problem for a job at reddit. They called me about a month later and had a 5 minute conversation with me, and then never heard from them agan. Assholes. My new rule is that I don't spend any ore than a few hours on any one single problem, unless they pay me, or if it's interesting enough.
__abc 14y ago
Having been hiring developers, designers, and product managers for the better part of the last ten years ..... I agree. I also hate the actual interview itself. So little time to try and learn something that for the most part cannot be learned in a high pressure, nervous, anxiety ridden situation (I realize I am also being interviewed, assessed, and reviewed). However, this is a different point altogether from what the author is discussing. I do think it's great to try and understand how someone 1 - Problem solves 2 - Approaches asking questions, interacting with other people, etc And quizes can sometimes be a way to figure that out. I've just found that when using quizzes it's better to openly communicate with the person what you, the interviewer, are trying to better understand. I always pre-amble a quiz (if and when I do use one) "hey, I'm going to ask you a question/quiz/riddle. It's important to note I could CARE LESS about the answer. I'm really looking to better understand how you would go about solving this. So please, make sure to walk me through your thought process and don't hesitate to ask me any questions along the way". I also like to make it clear how it ties into what the person will be working on. For example "the reason I ask, is one of the first projects you will be working on is ___________, so knowing how you approach nebulous problems will be important" The best response I had to this is Well, I might do X,Y,and Z, but to your real question, I have a great example, mind if I share that? Also, this is just a data point. Going back to my second paragraph, I've never once "not hired" someone based on how well they think on their feet in an anxiety ridden, pressure filed, hour of their life in a room with total strangers.
- crusso 14y ago
  I always pre-amble a quiz I dunno. That sort of defeats the objective of assessing that person's natural reaction to a little interview pressure. It's not water boarding, it's a simple programming or logic puzzle that requires most people to think.
  - __abc 14y ago
    People (on average) are nervous, anxious, etc during an interview. I don't really care how they "naturally" react in that situation as THAT situation isn't day-to-day (at least not in the software companies I've spent my time) so I'm almost don't really care about that. I really just care about how well they problem solve, not problem solve in a fox-hole with bullets flying over their head.
venomsnake 14y ago
I think there is some value in trying to see if a person can have a Columbus moment. After all the simplest solutions are hard to find. And it is nice to see how a person deals with problem outside his domain of knowledge. We don't want to hire someone that can have a nickname like Complicator or Rube Goldberg. But the questions must be rooted in reality. The correct answer to how much a Boing weights is check the manual. Аsk them how to minimize datacenter flooding or how to lift fuel 20 floors upwards with no pumps working - that were real things that real people had to solve just a few months ago. And they weren't hired for that.
zeidrich 14y ago
Interviews are a two way street, but in any negotiation there's different leverage. Most of the time, in the current job climate, the interviewer is the one with the leverage over the employee. For many people, a job interview ends up being "how much crap am I willing to put up with to make a living wage" and whether the interviewer (who may not even be someone you will ever work with again if you're hired) asks stupid riddles might factor very little into the equation. I think this article would be better suited if it targeted the interviewers to say "Look guys, asking riddles is pointless and might turn off the best candidates who /can/ afford to fire you and look for another company to interview with." On the other hand, you might consider whether you actually even want an employee who is willing to abandon the whole enterprise when they realize that an interviewer has the NERVE to ask them to solve a riddle or logic puzzle. Like raganwald said, the interviewer is probably not the best interviewer, and you can decide whether you want to work with him and make the best impression. Or you can decide that you will only work under the strictest of conditions, and if someone asks you a question you don't like, that you may as well just walk out of the room right then, because they're obviously an braying alphadog assholey jackass. If I was conducting an interview, and felt like asking a riddle like the article ("Four people want to cross a bridge. They all begin on the same side. You have twelve minutes to get all of them across to the other side. It is night. There is one flashlight. A maximum of two people can cross at one time"). If my candidate just said, calmly, and without agitation "Heh, you know, I'm not really good at on-the-spot logic problems like that. I don't know how long it takes for a trip anyways. But 4 people, weird restrictions, would probably take more than 4 and less than 4^2 trips." I would get a lot more out of it than if they blurted out a correct answer. On the other hand, I'd probably learn a lot if they slammed their hand on the table, called me a braying asshole and stormed out of the interview.
crusso 14y ago
This article reminds me to ask a pointless mind-bending riddle to each applicant just to weed out prima donna programmer types who can't handle a little mental poking and prodding during the course of an interview designed to see if he/she will be a good fit for spending a good part of his/her waking day with me every day. If you're too "good" to shift contexts beyond regurgitating your work experiences or coding a for loop for a few minutes -- then I don't want to be stuck in a room with you when there's a lot of pressure to meet a customer commitment that could mean our livelihood.
- hermannj314 14y ago
  I interviewed a candidate that had quite an alphabet soup and buzzword compliant resume. He was pretty much convinced he was the world's greatest programmer. I asked him if he could talk through how he would write a function that showed if an unsorted-array contained consecutive integers with no gaps and no duplicates. He said he never claimed he was a math major and that such a problem was unfair to ask. In other words, he had no idea what to do. But what was interesting was that this same guy could answer questions about the O(n) complexity of algorithms and explain how to write quicksort. Apparently, his pre-interview preparation involved memorizing that in hopes we would be dumb enough to mistake that for competence. If you are hiring a baseball player, you don't hire someone that that can rattle off baseball statistics or that talks about how they read about baseball for 4 years at college, you hire someone that can play baseball. Well, I am hiring a programmer. I don't care if memorized the names of design patterns; I care whether you can you actually use them.
  - jaimebuelta 14y ago
    Great comment. There are a lot of those questions that are repeated over and over and over...
- edwardunknown 14y ago
  You should make them pee in a cup while solving a riddle to be absolutely sure whoever you hire has no dignity.
fecak 14y ago
I've noticed that more and more topics are being labeled as inappropriate in interviews for developers. I have heard complaints about interviewers asking candidates to complete short programming tasks, producing past code samples, doing a whiteboard exercise, completing a pairing exercise, and objecting to a wide variety of questions. I understand that highly experienced professionals may get frustrated by some lines of questioning, but it's getting to the point that programmers feel they should walk in with a resume and say 'Trust me, I'm good', and immediately get a job offer. Keep in mind some interviewers will ask questions that they don't expect you to answer in order to learn something about you. Will you lie, admit not knowing the answer, describe how you'd find an answer, get frustrated and rant (as this author does with riddles), etc? It could reveal how you'd treat a customer or a co-worker. Candidates obviously have the power to walk out or not interview with places that are going to be more rigorous (or transparent) in the process, but what many candidates are classifying as 'unreasonable' for interviews these days is becoming a bit too long a list. I just published an article about this very topic http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5073791 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5073791
- danielweber 14y ago
  Working with one bozo ought to be enough to convince anyone that you need an anti-bozo filter, even if it eats up a few hours of time for your team.
  - pekk 14y ago
    The same should really apply to people interviewing for jobs. It's not too hard to find companies with bozos, including bozo interviewers.
    - danielweber 14y ago
      Given that you are going to work for a company for months or years, and interview with them for hours, you care much much more about the quality of the coworkers than the quality of the interviewers.
run4yourlives 14y ago
I think this should be taken with a grain of salt, and I say this specifically for this crowd, who I've noticed more and more aren't the prospective founders and outliers that it once contained but young, inexperienced new-grads or almost-grads that are just getting into the business and think starups are a good option. My advice, to be blunt, is this: Know your role. It's all well and good to rail against these (frankly) really dumb hiring practices. A lot of us are in the position where we don't have to put up with this crap. Of course a lot of us are in the position where we aren't interviewing at all anymore. Simply saying "I did such and such in the past" or even better "I worked with so and so" is good enough for many of us to land nice cushy gigs. Such is the benefit of a reputation, and you will build one, one way or another, in whatever niche you are in, over time. However, young Padawan, this is not you. Not now. You - like it or not - are simply a number on a job application. And discounting the few who are lucky enough to have completed a project that means something in your short lives, or to have the fortunate grace to share acquaintance (and high opinion) with someone the hiring person knows and respects, you are NOT "interviewing the company". You are a nothing. And just like all the other nothings that come through the door, if you want to get noticed you need to find a way to stand out from the crowd. You will likely not always be a nothing, but right now, you are. And so, your lot in life is to jump through hoops and toe the line until you can start to stand on your own two feet. Please don't take the approach that the interview is an equal transaction unless it actually is. I've 'not hired' far too many of you, to be honest. You'll know when the transaction is equal, and if you are asking the question, it isn't. That isn't to say you should take any offer that comes to you; just that you are in no position to be picky. And if you are bitching about interview questions, this is the position you are in.
- pekk 14y ago
  What comes across very clearly is that you talk like a tremendous asshole who I wouldn't want to supervise, let alone work under. Someone getting paid less than you doesn't entitle you to talk in this incredibly abusive way to them. Get some perspective. Knowing some people doesn't make you a badass. You are a nothing who knows some people. Big deal. Lots of people know some people, including total idiots. Not knowing some people doesn't make your juniors garbage. Anyone who wants to work with nice, cooperative people will avoid any shop which represents itself in this absolutely toxic way.
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duopixel 14y ago
I tend to agree with the author, but there are indeed some things you can infer from the type of response you get. I have a friend who was doing a technical interview, and things seemed to be going weird. It seemed that the candidate knew the answers to most of his questions, but when pressured further he couldn't come up with alternative solutions. It was like those people who know the motions of math, but don't understand what it's for. So he decided to ask one of these riddle questions: "How many hairs does a dog have?" and the candidate answered that it depended on the dog. So far so good. But then he started rambling: "Well, if it's a dog from the street, the dog might have scabies, and thus this dog has less hair. Of course, this is a perfectly valid answer, but it is the failure of applying math/statistical thinking into his answer what was telling. Now, I'm sure some people are thinking "that's anecdotical evidence" and it is, but what is the alternative if your intention is to hire mathematically inclined candidates?
- pekk 14y ago
  Test them more directly on tasks similar to what you will need them to do?
therandomguy 14y ago
Towards the end of the interview the interviewer told me, "your turn to ask me questions". I said, "I have this puzzle for you...". He turned pale for a moment and then laughed at the joke. I wasn't joking.
dasht 14y ago
Riddles, logic puzzles, "write some code on the whiteboard" .... It took me years to realize that these are not tests of technical ability, they are tests of submissiveness. For example, if you are being interviewed by someone at the same level as you for some position -- and they pull such crap -- now you know how low their expectations of the employer are. And if you are being interviewed by someone fairly senior relative to the position -- and they ask you such BS interview questions -- you can be damn sure that they themselves would laugh at and walk away from any interviewer that did that to them. So when you give the clever answer and wait for your gold star... you've established your place in the order of things.
cr4zy 14y ago
To me interviews are like weddings. High expectations and not enough practice - a great setup for some memorable mishaps. I'd just offer the following from lots of experience on both sides. - Make sure to write down a sample input and output. Sounds simple, but is often not done and the cause of a lot of wasted time. - After you're on the same page about the input and output, allow for a minute to think. Silence should be perfectly okay here. - Always discuss the strategy and various options before implementing the solution.
mjmahone17 14y ago
What falls into the riddle vs. "acceptable" role? In my mind, it's perfectly valid to ask, for instance, "Given a binary search tree, write a program to return all elements between a low and high." or "Write a program to return whether or not a given string matches a regular expression." Are these "riddles," as espoused by the article? Sort of: they do take some element of an "aha!" moment to solve, whereas the "recommended" questions were mainly just domain-knowledge questions. But if you solve these problems using convoluted coding techniques, then I as an interviewer would be really worried that you'd muddy our codebase unnecessarily, and if you can't see how to solve them, I may discover that you have a problem thinking recursively, or logicing through complex issues. Or, I may find that you tend to dive into a problem before thinking about it and designing your solution. All of these seem fairly relevant to any job, and I've actually turned down employers that asked me too many "domain-knowledge" questions and not enough "how do you think about things" questions, because I don't want to be somewhere where I'm just expected to "know" the answer.
mikecane 14y ago
The best question was asked by Steve Jobs: "How do you re-invent the phone?" All of you smartasses hiring with your riddle questions couldn't answer that.
nerdfiles 14y ago
I keep my interview questions in my "github résumé": https://github.com/nerdfiles/R-sum-/blob/master/q/to-startups.markdown https://github.com/nerdfiles/R-sum-/blob/master/q/to-startup... I recently had a headhunter e-mail me, offer no job description, but directed me to the website of the company, which makes iOS/iPhone apps. Two hours later he pinged me again asking if I read his previous e-mail. Nowhere in my many online résumés do I say I have iOS experience or that I am even interested in that kind of work. Moreover, I stress, emphasize, my interest in hypermedia and W3C Standards. This market is saturated with mismanagement, and there is a clear bottleneck. So, for instance, "hypermedia." Most developers and "techs" I mention this term to obviously have no idea what I'm talking about. And just entertain the fact that I made some jargonish sounding word, thus giving me the benefit of the doubt. But now I cannot find work I want to do because hardly anyone knows what hypermedia is, and that is _not_ my fault. I'm staying abreast with my industry, and now I am suffering for it. There is a bottleneck here, as with most "recruitment" industries. I don't even want to begin thinking about open source typography, with all the Microsoft Web Safe Fonts flying around.
BobWarfield 14y ago
Riddles are useless interview tools. When I am building a new dev team or adding to an existing one, I care about two things: 1. Did the candidate make a critical contribution to a piece of technology that I respect. I will start by asking them for examples of this in a lot of ways including asking them to present something they're proud of to the team. I will not rest until I have verified they did this through my network and back references. 2. Is their chemistry compatible with the team, or as it is more popularly put today, are they a good culture fit? That opportunity to present to the team is an important test. Another one is that the interviewing team has to catch them out being wrong about something and then see how they react to that. You can learn a lot about how someone deals with learning they're wrong about something. Lastly, we look for opportunities to socialize with the candidate. They can't be a good culture fit if nobody wants to spend non-work time with them.

95 points by techdog 14y ago

This is not a trivial career so why trivialize it? I'm more keen on seeing a person's past work or hearing about their experiences. Asking them how they've solved past problems and how they've faced past conflicts gives me insight into if we can start working together. That's all an interview is. There's no guarantees it will all work out and I believe no amount of interviewing techniques will change that.

raganwald 14y ago

The objective arguments are sound, in my opinion. I don't care for the flippant insults like "assholery," but I'm a big boy, I can filter these out. One thing to remember about interviewers that ask poor questions is that many such people aren't full-time professional interviewers. They are to interviewing as a marketing manager who does some Excel scripting is to programming. They are often repeating what they've heard or read or been subjected to, much as an inexperienced programmer tends to use whatever programming pattern was espoused in the last blog post he read. A terrible interviewer may still be a wonderful person to work alongside, just as someone who performs poorly under the pressure of an interview may be a fantastic programmer once hired and working on an actual project.

jiggy2011 14y ago
This. Also bear in mind that it is widely publicised that google and MS etc use these sorts of puzzles in their hiring process (whether or not this is true I have no idea). So there's a certain element of "if it's good enough for.."
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- Cookingboy 14y ago
  Both Google and MS have banned such riddles from their interviews, because they have been proven to be ineffective and results in large numbers of both false-negatives and false-positives.
  - hackinthebochs 14y ago
    Source?
    - Cookingboy 14y ago
      Documented source? I don't think companies publish their interview processes. Personal sources? The guy who interviewed me at MS a couple years ago told me himself, I also currently work for Google.
      - hackinthebochs 14y ago
        I mean source that they result in a lot of false negatives and false positives. If Google kept stats on the rating engineers got during the interview and how they went on to do at the company, this would be a good starting point for objective evidence.
        badgar 14y ago
        And exactly why on Earth would any company ever created publish such detailed information?
        hackinthebochs 14y ago
        In aggregate, I don't see what harm it would cause. It would help move the industry forward.
        Firehed 14y ago
        I don't have a source for this, but as an interviewer, simply thinking about what I can get from a riddle indicates it's probably true. I have a mental checklist of about fifteen items that I try to get answered when interviewing a candidate, and asking riddles would barely if at all help me answer any of them. That's not to say they're worthless, but when I have an hour or so to interview a candidate, they're not an effective use of my time (and I imagine that most candidates would think it's a lousy use of their time, too) - I ask questions that can answer four or five items on my list, not one if I'm lucky.
- majormajor 14y ago
  Seems like that was only true in the past. I've even had a Google interviewer tell me something along the lines of "I don't have a lot of questions picked out ahead of time cause they've told me I can't ask puzzles anymore" so hopefully that new state of things will trickle down in time.
- endtime 14y ago
  Google and Microsoft don't ask those kinds of questions. Both of them primarily ask questions related to algorithms and data structures, sometimes with a bit of software design thrown in. Source: I work for Google and have interned for Microsoft.
- varelse 14y ago
  Not anymore (previous googler)... My google interview was the best part of the whole time there to be honest. If the work had lived up to the people and problems presented in the interview, I would still be there, happy as a clam. Instead, it was a complete forced bait and switch onto a team doing something irrelevant to my skill set, which is my way of saying there are plenty of problems with Google, but this is not one of them.
  - notmyhnname 14y ago
    I've heard this a couple times now, and it worries me. I've got an on-site interview with Google soon, and my impression from the recruiter is that I would know which team I was joining at the offer stage. Can you go into some detail on what happened between your offer and joining Google that resulted in you feeling like it was a "bait and switch"? If it matters, I am not interviewing as a college hire, but as a senior engineer from another large tech company.
    - outside1234 14y ago
      A lot of people interview thinking they are going to work on Google Glasses and then get allocated to corporate IT. You don't know your role at the company until the day you start.
      - notmyhnname 14y ago
        Yes, I suppose what I'm looking for is where exactly things go awry. Again, the impression I'd gotten from my recruiter is that I'd have more or less a commitment from Google that I'd be working on a particular team at the offer stage. In particular, that I'd know which team I was going to work on when I accepted the offer. So it seems like either she's exaggerated that (in which case I would expect it to seem fairly obvious at the offer stage that you weren't yet assigned to a team), or that Google is in the habit of outright lying about team assignments, which I have a hard time buying.
        varelse 14y ago
crusso 14y ago
someone who performs poorly under the pressure of an interview may be a fantastic programmer once hired and working on an actual project Maybe. But then again if I have one spot open for the quarter then I'm probably not going to take the chance on someone who crumbles when asked how to get the duck safely across the river or whatever.
- waterlesscloud 14y ago
  And if a good programmer has a choice of employers (and they do), they probably aren't going to take a chance on someone whose idea of evaluating their skills is to ask how to get a duck across a river.
  - crusso 14y ago
    If that's the only thing asked during the interview then I might agree with you. It really never is, though, is it? Seriously, do you really want to work with someone who's too uptight to answer a couple of harmless riddles during the course of the interview process that includes a host of different methods for transferring information?
    - crosvenir 14y ago
      Yes, I do. Too many times I've worked with programmers that were pushovers to inane edicts from management, whereas if just a few had said, "I see what you're trying to do, can we accomplish this in a more efficient manner by ..."
  - mikecane 14y ago
    How many ducks are you dealing with in a day?
    - crusso 14y ago
      I'm way too embarrassed to say.
- radley 14y ago
groby_b 14y ago
Why, it's almost like you should have programmers program during an interview. A previous company I worked for did that. Build a small ad-hoc team of 3-4 people (with 1-2 existing employees, as knowledge repositories), and let the candidates work on a sort-of real problem for pretty much a day. Every team member occasionally came in and watched for a while, every team member looked at the repo for the end results, and the "embedded" people gave feedback on how it felt to work with the candidates. Yes, it's expensive. But so is a mishire, and it sure did work well to filter people out.

jiggy2011 14y ago

Surely all of these arguments boil down to balancing how important general intelligence vs domain expertise is to your hiring procedure. You could see these riddles as a stand in for just giving the candidate a full blown IQ test.

machrider 14y ago
You're assuming that the ability to solve one specific riddle (on the spot) is a reliable indicator of general intelligence.
- jiggy2011 14y ago
  Well, ideally you would have a test consisting of several riddles that was constructed by a psychologist who is an expert in IQ and g. Another proxy that is often used here is "Do you have a good degree in a difficult subject from a prestigious university?".
  - rhizome 14y ago
    ...which is a similarly unreliable indicator.
    - jiggy2011 14y ago
      How so? You can certainly unintentionally filter out smart people who didn't go to college (or went to a less prestigious college) by this method. However I imagine people who fit the description of "dumb guy who fluked his way through MIT math programme with a high GPA" are a pretty endangered species.
      - rhizome 14y ago
        For the purposes of a given job, let alone the types of jobs discussed in these threads, it's going to dump a bunch of false negatives. Since software is an industry that thrives on overqualified employees, this may not seem like a big deal, but having people who can interview a Big Degree person such that they'll accept these jobs has its own cost and management overhead.

melvinmt 14y ago

It's funny to see that developers have so much leverage on the job market that you can read phrases like "don't hire this employer, you're better than that" and act like that's the most normal thing in the world. I guess it's time for having paid interviews again.

runarb 14y ago
When you think about all the time and care most developers will spend on there jobs one should be picky. It is literally one of your life's most important decisions.
- sergiotapia 14y ago
  Hear, hear. The good software engineers are worth the money; they care about your product and apply years of expertise.
mattgreenrocks 14y ago
Funny? That's a little closer to how it should be. I'm so sick of the fear-saturated drivel that dominates much of 'common wisdom' surrounding employment: "dont' do this! don't do that! They may not like you!" It's disgusting and emasculating to constantly be told that we have to neuter ourselves into this docile, submissive employee because otherwise our boss might decide he doesn't like us.
mikeash 14y ago
Employers say that about candidates all the time. Why should it be a one-way thing?

Macsenour 14y ago

Having spent the last year interviewing for jobs. It has become clear to me that companies have no idea that they're being interviewed as they are interviewing me. Can't find a time to call me when I've given you 5 dates and times? Red flag. Can't get my resume into the hands of the folks who are interviewing me? Red Flag. Tell me it will be a week and it takes two? Red Flag. Call me 30 minutes after the scheduled time and not apologize. Red Flag. Tell me I'm a perfect fit for the job, then the HR person calls me 5 minutes later to say that they will not be moving forward with the interview process. Red Flag. Set up a time to Skype call me, cancel hours before the call, send an email 2 days later saying the job was filled before my interview. Black listed Tell me on the phone interview that I will be called in for the face to face, send me an email 2 weeks later saying the job was filled. Black listed Delay the hiring process because you want to hire another position first. Red Flag. I could go on, and all of this has happened in the last year.

pyre 14y ago
| Tell me it will be a week and it takes two? Red Flag. The thing that frustrated me the most about dealing with DeviantArt's interview process. No specific timelines, and 'soon' could mean anything from a couple of days to 3-4 weeks (with no response / contact).
kscaldef 14y ago
Are your "black lists" based on poor communication, or making an offer to another candidate while they haven't interviewed you yet?
- Macsenour 14y ago
  The difference between a Red Flag and a Black List, is that a Red Flag I might forgive given circumstances. A Black List means I'll never apply again, and often call or email to remove my resume from their database.
  - kscaldef 14y ago
    That didn't actually answer my question, which was about what the reason for that being a "black list" offense was.

ig1 14y ago

I'm not sure the author understands the difference between a riddle and a logic problem, a riddle typically uses misdirection and veiled meanings to hide an answer while a logic problem is one that can be solve by applying logical analysis. So for example "What has two heads, four eyes, six legs and a tail?" is a riddle because it's so open ended and relies upon linguistic trickery. On the other hand most bridge crossing problems are logic problems, you typically have a finite number of options and by deduction and logical analysis you can arrive at the correct answer (i.e the answer is not a trick answer). The advantage of logic problems as opposed to domain specific problems is that they let you separate an individuals logical reasoning ability from their experience. When you're hiring you want to make sure that the person you're hiring can deal not only with more general problems of the type they've seen before, but also that they can deal with esoteric problems that are very specific to the nature of your product. And that's when the ability to reason logically becomes much more important. Obviously if the candidate you're interviewing is already familiar with the logic problem you're presenting then you probably won't get much value from the candidates answer and you need to ask alternative questions to ascertain the same information.

jfoutz 14y ago
Two lettuces each impaled with two needles, running a six stage race, being chased by a private investigator.

icedchai 14y ago

The worst company I ever worked at (now out of business, fortunately) had an interviewer / hiring manager who asked these sorts of riddles. He also had a really thick accent. Later, he also proved to be technically incompetent. I quit after 6 months.

kscaldef 14y ago
What did his accent have to do with the rest of this?
- jlgreco 14y ago
  I assume he is implying that the technical incompetence caused people to second-guess what they heard when confusion arose. This confusion can be misunderstood by the interviewer as confusion over the subject matter. I know I've had that problem before over poor telephone connections.
- pekk 14y ago
  People who have any kind of trouble communicating verbally with normal native speakers of the language in which business is to be transacted, are not a great choice for jobs which require clear communication.
- icedchai 14y ago
  People who are poor communicators should generally not be in leadership positions. It actually wasn't just the accent, as his written English was absolutely awful, too.

waivej 14y ago

It makes me want to ask an interviewer to code a solution to fizzbuzz or solve a riddle.

pyre 14y ago
Maybe you should! You should be interviewing them as much as they are interviewing you. When they ask if you have any questions for them, respond with, "Could you solve this for me?" Then give them a programming problem. If you're being interviewed by a non-technical person (who obviously can't program), that could be a red flag right there (in and of itself).
runarb 14y ago
Good idea! Draw them the "Thinking outside the box"[1] puzzle or something. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking_outside_the_box http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking_outside_the_box
danielweber 14y ago
If I am interviewing you, I wouldn't mind you giving me a puzzle. Depending on how you do it, I would think you are either the world's biggest asshole, or a very easy guy to work with, and that's very valuable information.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

apalmer 14y ago

First off I am not really pro riddle per say, however we do use some 'riddles' at my current employer. 1) Sometimes they can point out really big gaping holes in basic logic ability, for instance we ask about basic logic with the NAND gate riddle, we explain you can compose the common logical operations just using NAND. Ask the interviewee to construct NOT using NAND, usually if they have never seen anything like this, we walk em through it as a freebie... so now they have NOT and NAND, and we ask them to construct AND. How many Architects we have interviewed, with 10+ years of experience who could not logically figure out how to combine NOT and NOTAND to get a logical AND... 2) Second, we mostly dont actually care too much about getting the correct answers to the riddles. Its partially to look at the way person solves problems, but mostly its psychological. In software dealing with non tech, high level biz people, you get all kinds of bizarre requests. If you throw a hissy fit in the middle of an interview, or storm out because someone asks you a riddle... Are we to expect you to keep your head when the VP of Sales asks you for something 'crazy'?

freework 14y ago

The same can be applied to pre-interview screening problems as well. I recently send my resume to a company that was advertising on the Hacker New job board (I'm not going to say which company it was). They replied to my email telling me that in order to get to the next step in the process, I need to solve a problem and send them my code. They wanted me to send them a conway's game of life board that, after 1000 generations, could be converted to a GIF and would make up a black and white image they included in the email. Basically they wanted me to take their image, convert it to a conway game of life board, and then figure out how to calculate backwards game of life generations. Sounds to me like a fools errand. I deleted the email and never thought about it again. I have better things to do to fill up my free time. Maybe if they had me do something actually useful or meaningful...

brown9-2 14y ago
That doesn't sound like a "riddle" to me. It sounds like a programming task, although one which might not be directly relevant to a lot of domains.
nollidge 14y ago
That sounds like a fun challenge, and if it's at all representative of the sorts of problems they take on, I'd love to know who the company was so I can apply.
- freework 14y ago
  The fist task is converting the GIF into a data structure. That could take anywhere between one hour and one day. Since I personally have no experience reading data from GIF files, it is probably going to take me one day. The next step is to figure out how to reverse generate conway's game of life. If you have previous game of life experience, you may already know how to do that. But I'm not a game of life expert. Its going to take quite a bit of research and trial and error to get that working. It will probably take me at least a day. It all boils down to this: I don't want to waste two days of programming time for something as pointless as this. Especially since they could very easily say "sorry you're not a cultural fit" after spending all that time. Thats actually what happened to me a few months ago when I spent 4 days doing a programming problem for a job at reddit. They called me about a month later and had a 5 minute conversation with me, and then never heard from them agan. Assholes. My new rule is that I don't spend any ore than a few hours on any one single problem, unless they pay me, or if it's interesting enough.

__abc 14y ago

Having been hiring developers, designers, and product managers for the better part of the last ten years ..... I agree. I also hate the actual interview itself. So little time to try and learn something that for the most part cannot be learned in a high pressure, nervous, anxiety ridden situation (I realize I am also being interviewed, assessed, and reviewed). However, this is a different point altogether from what the author is discussing. I do think it's great to try and understand how someone 1 - Problem solves 2 - Approaches asking questions, interacting with other people, etc And quizes can sometimes be a way to figure that out. I've just found that when using quizzes it's better to openly communicate with the person what you, the interviewer, are trying to better understand. I always pre-amble a quiz (if and when I do use one) "hey, I'm going to ask you a question/quiz/riddle. It's important to note I could CARE LESS about the answer. I'm really looking to better understand how you would go about solving this. So please, make sure to walk me through your thought process and don't hesitate to ask me any questions along the way". I also like to make it clear how it ties into what the person will be working on. For example "the reason I ask, is one of the first projects you will be working on is ___________, so knowing how you approach nebulous problems will be important" The best response I had to this is Well, I might do X,Y,and Z, but to your real question, I have a great example, mind if I share that? Also, this is just a data point. Going back to my second paragraph, I've never once "not hired" someone based on how well they think on their feet in an anxiety ridden, pressure filed, hour of their life in a room with total strangers.

crusso 14y ago
I always pre-amble a quiz I dunno. That sort of defeats the objective of assessing that person's natural reaction to a little interview pressure. It's not water boarding, it's a simple programming or logic puzzle that requires most people to think.
- __abc 14y ago
  People (on average) are nervous, anxious, etc during an interview. I don't really care how they "naturally" react in that situation as THAT situation isn't day-to-day (at least not in the software companies I've spent my time) so I'm almost don't really care about that. I really just care about how well they problem solve, not problem solve in a fox-hole with bullets flying over their head.

venomsnake 14y ago

I think there is some value in trying to see if a person can have a Columbus moment. After all the simplest solutions are hard to find. And it is nice to see how a person deals with problem outside his domain of knowledge. We don't want to hire someone that can have a nickname like Complicator or Rube Goldberg. But the questions must be rooted in reality. The correct answer to how much a Boing weights is check the manual. Аsk them how to minimize datacenter flooding or how to lift fuel 20 floors upwards with no pumps working - that were real things that real people had to solve just a few months ago. And they weren't hired for that.

zeidrich 14y ago

Interviews are a two way street, but in any negotiation there's different leverage. Most of the time, in the current job climate, the interviewer is the one with the leverage over the employee. For many people, a job interview ends up being "how much crap am I willing to put up with to make a living wage" and whether the interviewer (who may not even be someone you will ever work with again if you're hired) asks stupid riddles might factor very little into the equation. I think this article would be better suited if it targeted the interviewers to say "Look guys, asking riddles is pointless and might turn off the best candidates who /can/ afford to fire you and look for another company to interview with." On the other hand, you might consider whether you actually even want an employee who is willing to abandon the whole enterprise when they realize that an interviewer has the NERVE to ask them to solve a riddle or logic puzzle. Like raganwald said, the interviewer is probably not the best interviewer, and you can decide whether you want to work with him and make the best impression. Or you can decide that you will only work under the strictest of conditions, and if someone asks you a question you don't like, that you may as well just walk out of the room right then, because they're obviously an braying alphadog assholey jackass. If I was conducting an interview, and felt like asking a riddle like the article ("Four people want to cross a bridge. They all begin on the same side. You have twelve minutes to get all of them across to the other side. It is night. There is one flashlight. A maximum of two people can cross at one time"). If my candidate just said, calmly, and without agitation "Heh, you know, I'm not really good at on-the-spot logic problems like that. I don't know how long it takes for a trip anyways. But 4 people, weird restrictions, would probably take more than 4 and less than 4^2 trips." I would get a lot more out of it than if they blurted out a correct answer. On the other hand, I'd probably learn a lot if they slammed their hand on the table, called me a braying asshole and stormed out of the interview.

crusso 14y ago

This article reminds me to ask a pointless mind-bending riddle to each applicant just to weed out prima donna programmer types who can't handle a little mental poking and prodding during the course of an interview designed to see if he/she will be a good fit for spending a good part of his/her waking day with me every day. If you're too "good" to shift contexts beyond regurgitating your work experiences or coding a for loop for a few minutes -- then I don't want to be stuck in a room with you when there's a lot of pressure to meet a customer commitment that could mean our livelihood.

hermannj314 14y ago
I interviewed a candidate that had quite an alphabet soup and buzzword compliant resume. He was pretty much convinced he was the world's greatest programmer. I asked him if he could talk through how he would write a function that showed if an unsorted-array contained consecutive integers with no gaps and no duplicates. He said he never claimed he was a math major and that such a problem was unfair to ask. In other words, he had no idea what to do. But what was interesting was that this same guy could answer questions about the O(n) complexity of algorithms and explain how to write quicksort. Apparently, his pre-interview preparation involved memorizing that in hopes we would be dumb enough to mistake that for competence. If you are hiring a baseball player, you don't hire someone that that can rattle off baseball statistics or that talks about how they read about baseball for 4 years at college, you hire someone that can play baseball. Well, I am hiring a programmer. I don't care if memorized the names of design patterns; I care whether you can you actually use them.
- jaimebuelta 14y ago
  Great comment. There are a lot of those questions that are repeated over and over and over...
edwardunknown 14y ago
You should make them pee in a cup while solving a riddle to be absolutely sure whoever you hire has no dignity.

fecak 14y ago

I've noticed that more and more topics are being labeled as inappropriate in interviews for developers. I have heard complaints about interviewers asking candidates to complete short programming tasks, producing past code samples, doing a whiteboard exercise, completing a pairing exercise, and objecting to a wide variety of questions. I understand that highly experienced professionals may get frustrated by some lines of questioning, but it's getting to the point that programmers feel they should walk in with a resume and say 'Trust me, I'm good', and immediately get a job offer. Keep in mind some interviewers will ask questions that they don't expect you to answer in order to learn something about you. Will you lie, admit not knowing the answer, describe how you'd find an answer, get frustrated and rant (as this author does with riddles), etc? It could reveal how you'd treat a customer or a co-worker. Candidates obviously have the power to walk out or not interview with places that are going to be more rigorous (or transparent) in the process, but what many candidates are classifying as 'unreasonable' for interviews these days is becoming a bit too long a list. I just published an article about this very topic http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5073791 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5073791

danielweber 14y ago
Working with one bozo ought to be enough to convince anyone that you need an anti-bozo filter, even if it eats up a few hours of time for your team.
- pekk 14y ago
  The same should really apply to people interviewing for jobs. It's not too hard to find companies with bozos, including bozo interviewers.
  - danielweber 14y ago
    Given that you are going to work for a company for months or years, and interview with them for hours, you care much much more about the quality of the coworkers than the quality of the interviewers.

run4yourlives 14y ago

I think this should be taken with a grain of salt, and I say this specifically for this crowd, who I've noticed more and more aren't the prospective founders and outliers that it once contained but young, inexperienced new-grads or almost-grads that are just getting into the business and think starups are a good option. My advice, to be blunt, is this: Know your role. It's all well and good to rail against these (frankly) really dumb hiring practices. A lot of us are in the position where we don't have to put up with this crap. Of course a lot of us are in the position where we aren't interviewing at all anymore. Simply saying "I did such and such in the past" or even better "I worked with so and so" is good enough for many of us to land nice cushy gigs. Such is the benefit of a reputation, and you will build one, one way or another, in whatever niche you are in, over time. However, young Padawan, this is not you. Not now. You - like it or not - are simply a number on a job application. And discounting the few who are lucky enough to have completed a project that means something in your short lives, or to have the fortunate grace to share acquaintance (and high opinion) with someone the hiring person knows and respects, you are NOT "interviewing the company". You are a nothing. And just like all the other nothings that come through the door, if you want to get noticed you need to find a way to stand out from the crowd. You will likely not always be a nothing, but right now, you are. And so, your lot in life is to jump through hoops and toe the line until you can start to stand on your own two feet. Please don't take the approach that the interview is an equal transaction unless it actually is. I've 'not hired' far too many of you, to be honest. You'll know when the transaction is equal, and if you are asking the question, it isn't. That isn't to say you should take any offer that comes to you; just that you are in no position to be picky. And if you are bitching about interview questions, this is the position you are in.

pekk 14y ago
What comes across very clearly is that you talk like a tremendous asshole who I wouldn't want to supervise, let alone work under. Someone getting paid less than you doesn't entitle you to talk in this incredibly abusive way to them. Get some perspective. Knowing some people doesn't make you a badass. You are a nothing who knows some people. Big deal. Lots of people know some people, including total idiots. Not knowing some people doesn't make your juniors garbage. Anyone who wants to work with nice, cooperative people will avoid any shop which represents itself in this absolutely toxic way.

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duopixel 14y ago

I tend to agree with the author, but there are indeed some things you can infer from the type of response you get. I have a friend who was doing a technical interview, and things seemed to be going weird. It seemed that the candidate knew the answers to most of his questions, but when pressured further he couldn't come up with alternative solutions. It was like those people who know the motions of math, but don't understand what it's for. So he decided to ask one of these riddle questions: "How many hairs does a dog have?" and the candidate answered that it depended on the dog. So far so good. But then he started rambling: "Well, if it's a dog from the street, the dog might have scabies, and thus this dog has less hair. Of course, this is a perfectly valid answer, but it is the failure of applying math/statistical thinking into his answer what was telling. Now, I'm sure some people are thinking "that's anecdotical evidence" and it is, but what is the alternative if your intention is to hire mathematically inclined candidates?

pekk 14y ago
Test them more directly on tasks similar to what you will need them to do?

therandomguy 14y ago

Towards the end of the interview the interviewer told me, "your turn to ask me questions". I said, "I have this puzzle for you...". He turned pale for a moment and then laughed at the joke. I wasn't joking.

dasht 14y ago

Riddles, logic puzzles, "write some code on the whiteboard" .... It took me years to realize that these are not tests of technical ability, they are tests of submissiveness. For example, if you are being interviewed by someone at the same level as you for some position -- and they pull such crap -- now you know how low their expectations of the employer are. And if you are being interviewed by someone fairly senior relative to the position -- and they ask you such BS interview questions -- you can be damn sure that they themselves would laugh at and walk away from any interviewer that did that to them. So when you give the clever answer and wait for your gold star... you've established your place in the order of things.

cr4zy 14y ago

To me interviews are like weddings. High expectations and not enough practice - a great setup for some memorable mishaps. I'd just offer the following from lots of experience on both sides. - Make sure to write down a sample input and output. Sounds simple, but is often not done and the cause of a lot of wasted time. - After you're on the same page about the input and output, allow for a minute to think. Silence should be perfectly okay here. - Always discuss the strategy and various options before implementing the solution.

mjmahone17 14y ago

What falls into the riddle vs. "acceptable" role? In my mind, it's perfectly valid to ask, for instance, "Given a binary search tree, write a program to return all elements between a low and high." or "Write a program to return whether or not a given string matches a regular expression." Are these "riddles," as espoused by the article? Sort of: they do take some element of an "aha!" moment to solve, whereas the "recommended" questions were mainly just domain-knowledge questions. But if you solve these problems using convoluted coding techniques, then I as an interviewer would be really worried that you'd muddy our codebase unnecessarily, and if you can't see how to solve them, I may discover that you have a problem thinking recursively, or logicing through complex issues. Or, I may find that you tend to dive into a problem before thinking about it and designing your solution. All of these seem fairly relevant to any job, and I've actually turned down employers that asked me too many "domain-knowledge" questions and not enough "how do you think about things" questions, because I don't want to be somewhere where I'm just expected to "know" the answer.

mikecane 14y ago

The best question was asked by Steve Jobs: "How do you re-invent the phone?" All of you smartasses hiring with your riddle questions couldn't answer that.

nerdfiles 14y ago

I keep my interview questions in my "github résumé": https://github.com/nerdfiles/R-sum-/blob/master/q/to-startups.markdown https://github.com/nerdfiles/R-sum-/blob/master/q/to-startup... I recently had a headhunter e-mail me, offer no job description, but directed me to the website of the company, which makes iOS/iPhone apps. Two hours later he pinged me again asking if I read his previous e-mail. Nowhere in my many online résumés do I say I have iOS experience or that I am even interested in that kind of work. Moreover, I stress, emphasize, my interest in hypermedia and W3C Standards. This market is saturated with mismanagement, and there is a clear bottleneck. So, for instance, "hypermedia." Most developers and "techs" I mention this term to obviously have no idea what I'm talking about. And just entertain the fact that I made some jargonish sounding word, thus giving me the benefit of the doubt. But now I cannot find work I want to do because hardly anyone knows what hypermedia is, and that is _not_ my fault. I'm staying abreast with my industry, and now I am suffering for it. There is a bottleneck here, as with most "recruitment" industries. I don't even want to begin thinking about open source typography, with all the Microsoft Web Safe Fonts flying around.

BobWarfield 14y ago

Riddles are useless interview tools. When I am building a new dev team or adding to an existing one, I care about two things: 1. Did the candidate make a critical contribution to a piece of technology that I respect. I will start by asking them for examples of this in a lot of ways including asking them to present something they're proud of to the team. I will not rest until I have verified they did this through my network and back references. 2. Is their chemistry compatible with the team, or as it is more popularly put today, are they a good culture fit? That opportunity to present to the team is an important test. Another one is that the interviewing team has to catch them out being wrong about something and then see how they react to that. You can learn a lot about how someone deals with learning they're wrong about something. Lastly, we look for opportunities to socialize with the candidate. They can't be a good culture fit if nobody wants to spend non-work time with them.