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The Only Interview Question That Matters

199 points by engassa 13y ago

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
rocky1138 13y ago
Can you do the job?
- herge 13y ago
  Can you define the job?
  - madlynormal 13y ago
    Yes. Please have 5+ years experience with Javascript ES6 specification.
    - smsm42 13y ago
      That's not a job. Unless, of course, some is giving out money for just having experience with Javascript - in which case please tell me who so I can apply and get a nice income supplement while spending no time doing anything. Not holding my breath though.
- collyw 13y ago
  Thats an easy one to fake the correct answer though.
- rocky1138 13y ago
  For reference: http://www.forbes.com/sites/georgebradt/2011/04/27/top-executive-recruiters-agree-there-are-only-three-key-job-interview-questions/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/georgebradt/2011/04/27/top-execu...
jxf 13y ago
This is a pretty linkbaity oversimplification. It's designed to appeal to the belief that there's a "magic bullet" for everything. Hiring people via interviews is hard, because evaluating people with limited time and context is hard. There's no such thing as a question that will tell you everything. If you're really trying to get an accurate picture of a candidate, conduct an accurate simulation. Get away from interviews as the only means of evaluating someone, and use something that more closely approximates the actual conditions under which they'll be working. Maybe that's a probationary period where you pay them at contractor rates, or maybe you pay them to make a bugfix to an open-source project that you depend on, or whatever. Asking questions can tell you a lot about how a person thinks and works, but it's never a substitute for the real thing.
- darkxanthos 13y ago
  I don't see an oversimplification here. If a programmer, business person, whoever cant answer that question well I can definitely see how they might not be the kind of person I want to work with.
  - kelseyfrancis 13y ago
    An answer to that question is necessary but not sufficient.
- AaronBBrown 13y ago
  I read this a lot here about probationary or trial periods and I agree that it's a great idea, in principle. However, the reality of the developer and system engineer ecosystem right now is that it's an employee's market. Good people are already employed and probably get a couple job leads every day via professional contacts, LinkedIn, or other channels. Those people aren't going to be willing to jump through these kinds of hoops, quit their day job, or generally want to deal with putting this much effort into an uncertain outcome when there are so many lower friction and equally rewarding positions. I realize that I'm generalizing and that you may be able to come up with a few anecdotes to make your point, but no one I know would deal with this. This might be a great way of hiring college interns or people trying to break into the technology field, but not practical for hiring established or senior positions. I like your idea about contributing to some open source project (paid), though even in that case, you will likely run into qualified people who are unwilling (or legally unable) to do this and as an interviewer, you need to be careful not to exclude those individuals.
DonPellegrino 13y ago
Good article, terrible link-baity title.
peacemaker 13y ago
As a senior guy who's been programming a long time, I honestly don't know what I'd pick in answer to this question. Partly because I've done loads of cool (and no so cool) things over the years and partly because I don't have the best memory in the world. How do you decide which past accomplishment is worthy of a 30 minute conversation? Usually what comes to mind when asked this question are simply the most recent things I've worked on. If you've had the misfortune of doing crappy work for the last few months then it makes it a bit harder. I've seen lots of these kinds of posts, trying to "solve" interviewing. It's a topic close to me right now as I'm in the middle of the interview cycle myself. I just don't think it can be solved. There are too many variables and too many non-scientific aspects to it. Most of the time interviews are decided in that first impression with your interviewer - it feels like a primal instinct people have about other people. One thing I can say though, is that you aren't going to find the perfect candidate with just one question.
- duncanawoods 13y ago
  Yep. This question is actually: "Tell me about a project in which you demonstrate the skills and character attributes that I am looking for without me telling you what those are." A good interviewer will ask questions like this only having given you enough context to choose the most appropriate example. A bad interviewer will not, instead believing that the less information they give you the more revealing your answers will be. All they achieve is to introduce more chance into the interview process by leading you to pick less relevant examples.
- danielweber 13y ago
  There are a whole bunch of "Perfect Interview Questions" that merely filter out people who have never heard them before. This is the latest on the list. I'm in job-hunt mode so I guess I'm going to sit down and prepare an answer for this one, too.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- tootie 13y ago
  I've been a pro for nearly 15 years and the project that I'm most proud of was something i did as an undergrad. Now I'm sad.
nawitus 13y ago
So what should software engineers who are "merely" doing solid and great programming on "average" and typical applications respond? It's not like programmers can pick and choose difficult projects.
- eli 13y ago
  They literally don't have one thing that was a significant accomplishment? Something from school? From outside work? That wouldn't be a deal breaker for me, but for someone who supposedly has a bit of experience it's a red flag.
  - danielweber 13y ago
    What does "significant" mean? I've worked on many great projects that have ended up going nowhere, sometimes because the market simply didn't materialize, sometimes because management pulled the plug just before shipping, sometimes because the whole company went bankrupt because funding dried up because our lead investor was on a plane that some terrorists blew into a building. These "how to hire the best people!" articles are worse than "Cosmo" giving dating advice to teenage girls.
    - eli 13y ago
      It means whatever you want it to mean. The point is to get you talking about a project you care about. About the specifics rather than generalities. Your comment sounds like a perfectly fine answer to me. I personally would ask you which project was the most interesting to work on? Or which were you most disappointed by when it didn't ship? And why. At least, that's what I'm looking for when I ask it.
- 300bps 13y ago
  I think you have hit the nail on the head regarding the purpose of the question. The question is used to find stars. That is, someone who is 50x more productive than programmers: "merely" doing solid and great programming on "average" and typical applications
Zigurd 13y ago
It's a good open-ended question that would bring the interviewee to the item on their resume that's actually the most indicative of their potential. This is a good tool for focusing the interview. The follow-up questions are OK, but for interviewing a coder I'd rather talk about a significant sample of their code.
coldcode 13y ago
Odd I go to the page and there is no content. I guess it doesn't matter...
- aw3c2 13y ago
  It requires you to enable Javascript because it is a broken website. Oddly enough there is pretty much no content then anyways. ;) The question is "What single project or task would you consider your most significant accomplishment in your career to date?" Big whoop!
Bahamut 13y ago
I don't like this question - I do a lot of things, answering this question doesn't say a lot about me. It gives a vastly incomplete picture of me. I would say that it is one of those bad generic questions.
- eli 13y ago
  It's hard to talk about a lot of things in an interview so the question focuses on one thing... that you get to pick. Agree that this post has a terrible title and making a hire/no hire on one question is insane, but it's a good question.
  - Bahamut 13y ago
    I disagree - these are the same types of questions you might see on a college application. As far as my experience goes, it's a question that has massive flaws, especially when you deal with people who has an impressive & flexible set of skills/strengths - it selects against some of the very best, since for them, it's difficult to say what is the most significant accomplishment since many accomplishments manifest as significant in different ways. To select one is to likely avoid talk on the others, and to make a snap judgment call on the implicit question of what is significant, which may end up with a flawed answer that the interviewee may not make normally. That is why I fundamentally disagree with such a question being important for hiring. If you want to test how someone handles pressure, that can be manifested in other ways. If you want someone to discuss their accomplishments, a simple request for the person to describe some of his/her accomplishments would be less flawed (i.e. "Tell me a little about yourself and what you have done") - it would also be less confrontational.
    - robbiea 13y ago
      Why would you want to be less confrontational in an interview? The point is to see if the candidate is good or not, not "let's see how I can ask this question in the nicest way possible so I can get a nice and safe response that the candidate will just read off his / her resume". The fact is this question weeds out people who truly havent' done anything difficult or unable to communicate their achievements properly. If you have an impressive set of skill / strength, then it should be easy enough for you to pick one. In my mind the question forces the candidate to show the interviewer his / her: 1) Communication skills (i.e, is this person going to tell me all their problems, or just the one major problem that he/she needs help with) 2) What they view as an accomplishment or challenge 3) How they handle challenges 4) Their ambition (i.e, did they take a leadership position in their accomplishment or did they sit back and let everyone lead the project)
pg 13y ago
"What single project or task would you consider your most significant accomplishment in your career to date?" If this is the best question you can ask people, we got really lucky, because this is the essential question on all YC's application forms for events (e.g. Startup School) and has been one of the core questions on the YC application since the beginning.
- danmaz74 13y ago
  On the other hand, in my experience, the question works much better when asked in person than in writing. Just seeing the face of the interviewee while you ask the question lets you understand if there is real passion for that kind of job; the answers I get in writing these days (ie by email while screening people) are unfortunately much less telling :(
  - jseliger 13y ago
    Just seeing the face of the interviewee while you ask the question lets you understand if there is real passion for that kind of job; Is this deceptively informative? I hate to cite Malcolm Gladwell but I do think Blink shows us that first impressions and fleeting impressions can be dangerous and wrong. What do we think "real passion" is? Does it really show on the face, or do we only think we know? Can being flustered or off-kilter skew the impressions we give?
    - danmaz74 13y ago
      To be clear, I don't care what "real passion" really is. I just care about selecting a candidate who is interested in what we work on, and not just for the money. Interviewing is just a screening process, and of course fluster increases the risk of a false negative, but in that situation I'm much more concerned with false positives, and in that respect: No, watching also the body language for that kind of question isn't deceptively informative; it's much more informative than reading the same answer from a written text.
    - afterburner 13y ago
      I thought Blink primarily showed how first impressions can be more correct than considered and careful reasoning.
rubiquity 13y ago
The Only Interview Question Followed By 18 Other Questions That Matter
jessriedel 13y ago
Not sure if the reasoning is the same, but I always thought academics should be judged by their few very best ideas. Applying for your first postdoc: What's your best idea? Assistant prof: what are your two best papers? Tenure decision: what are your 5 best papers? Everyone likes to churn out a list of triple digit publications, but 99% of those will have no discernible impact on the world.
kabdib 13y ago
I've been in the industry for 35 years now (and hacking computers before that). If I picked just one accomplishment, I'd have to choose just one from all the accomplishments that I'm equally proud of. Furthermore, if I chose one from earlier in my career, one which was really neat and a lot of fun and technically sweet and saved the project's bacon, you might think I'd not done much interesting stuff since then. If you ask this, you're not going to get much actual data. You won't see me write code, you won't see me react to something totally new. I might ask this during a screening interview, but it's a soft question that should lead into more concrete technical assessments. So: Meh. No silver bullet.
jballanc 13y ago
Eh...forgive me for saying, but this is a bit of a cop-out. Especially where the author notes that you then have to supplement this "one question" with 20 min of follow-up. It's essentially saying "the only interview question that matters is having an interview". I'm not saying that this doesn't work. I've been through my fair share of interviews on both sides of the table, and focusing an interview on various dimensions of a single project is a far, far better strategy than the typical haphazard array of semi-related questions on people skills and technical ability. Really, I think it's not even so important that you focus on the "that you're most proud of" part. This tack would work just as well, I suspect, with the interviewees second or third most notable accomplishment. What's important is that it is a project of sufficient size that you can ask the follow-ups, and in doing so construct a consistent picture of the candidate as an employee. If you really want one question to get the most information from someone, my goto has always been: "What is your current favorite language/framework/technology stack? What do you hate about it?" Ok, so technically that's two (or one two-part question), but I've found that this question will very quickly reveal how able someone is to think critically and to assess all facets of the decisions that they make.
- danielweber 13y ago
  Sounds like "Pick some job from your resume, and let's talk about it." Which is pretty effective.
- platz 13y ago
  Well sure, if you've interviewing folks without many/any accomplishments under their belt, that question wouldn't work as well.
randallsquared 13y ago
This will get you a successful candidate who can talk at length about something they might have done. If talking is the bulk of the job, congratulations. If the job involves actually doing something requiring some skill, perhaps you should be testing for the skill, rather than ability to tell a (possibly true!) story. Surely everyone has worked with that person who is confident and charismatic, who inspires confidence in everyone who hasn't (for example) read their code, but who produces negative work every day on the job. When that person eventually leaves (perhaps after spending months or years being shuffled around to the places they can do the least harm by their peers), they will have no problem finding a lucrative job elsewhere, because they are easy and fun to talk to, and can go on for hours about the very important projects they were on.
tptacek 13y ago
I see how this one interview question is expansive and sets up a line of followup questions. I don't see why it's a good question. Presume you get an good answer to the question and every followup question. Now tell me this: how much more do you know about how capable the candidate is of doing the job you're hiring for? And, were these questions the fastest, most accurate way of learning that? I submit: no. "What were the biggest challenges you faced"? How do I assess the answer to that question? How do I compare it with answers from other candidates? How do I track, over time, which challenges correlate to strong performance in the actual role we're hiring for? "Explain your manager's style and whether you liked it"? Come on. Don't virtually all of these questions ask me to read tea leaves, to get a sense of whether I "like" or "respect" the candidate? That's not the same thing as learning whether the candidate will do a good job. Oh, and good luck hiring anyone right out of college this way.
- logicallee 13y ago
  Because some people cap at "I managed to code the most lines of code in June, 2006 among my seven colleagues, even though I was just hired on the tenth of the month and didn't know the code yet. That was quite a month." whereas others cap at, "well, I did manage to build the world's first and largest bitcoin currency exchange and reach volumes of about a million a day before we had to shut down." when you find out they did it by themselves, that is a huge difference. like two orders of magnitude FTE's. it's like, if some guy spearheaded and came up with the whole idea behind the new Mac Pro, in an era of stagnant desktops, the whole mechanics and central idea (with the heat core). This question lets you know this. a million examples, this is really just one.
  - tptacek 13y ago
    So this one interview question allows you to make the decision between hiring someone who has only worked in the profession for a month and hiring someone who wrote a whole bitcoin exchange. Faint praise. The big issue is, what does this style of interviewing do for you with a real-world candidate selection challenge --- say, 3 developers, all similar on paper? There is no reason the best candidate necessarily has the best story. The story of your "best accomplishment" has as much to do with random chance as it does with capability. This question demands that an interview somehow de-confound the luck element and the skill element. And to what end? Even if you got a clean reading on this question, somehow equalized between the candidates, I ask again: do you really know a lot more about how the candidate will actually perform on the job? Because that is almost the only question that matters in candidate selection.
Jare 13y ago
How about: "Let me tell you about a few of my accomplishments and then I'd love to hear which one you think is most significant for the kind of work I'd do in your organization" Interviews go both ways.
- lyndonh 13y ago
  Absolutely. These articles are always aimed at the candidate. Where are the articles about "The most important question the interviewer has to be able to answer" ? e.g. How are (you/the guy who's going to manage me) going to enable me to do great things here ? What's the most (important project/major change), that was proposed by someone in this kind of position, that has gone into production ? If I do this job well, where do you expect me to be in 5 years time ?
mrfusion 13y ago
I'll have a couple good accomplishments on the job every year but nothing jumps out at me as the biggest accomplishment of my life. How should I answer? Just pick out a recent one I guess. Does anyone else have this problem?
fit2rule 13y ago
I don't agree with this sentiment .. I think this is a very shallow approach to evaluating people on the basis of their past accomplishments, and also somewhat presumptuous to consider that they might 'outdo' their past accomplishments just by working for you. Therefore in my opinon the most important interview question to ask is this: "Do you want to work here?" .. followed up by: "Why do you want to work here?" If the answers to these two questions don't jive with what you need/want as an employer, then there are no further questions to ask.
throaway9091 13y ago
It's all a nice way of saying: Employer: "How low can I pay you, and how many hours will you work?" Candidate: "I can't compete with the H1B slaves." Employer: "Oh, okay. Then let me give you a tricky whiteboard question and reject you based on that, so you don't sue me."
- smsm42 13y ago
  I've never seen pay discussed in hitech at the same place as technical competency - and never before such competency is asserted. It is pretty stupid to bargain about something if you have not even a slightest idea how valuable it is. Of course, interviewing for some job where only headcount matters is different.
bowlofpetunias 13y ago
I'm 46 years old. You want me to pick one? I mean, I get it, I use this question regularly as an interviewer, but if you have me on the other side of the table, you're giving me a lot of room to tell you exactly the story you want to hear... Especially if you pull this question out of the bag late in the process, when I you've already given me enough insight in what would impress you. Like most interview tactics, it's very context sensitive. There is no silver bullet for interviews, and certainly not only one question that matters.
- smsm42 13y ago
  "I can't pick one but here's couple of recent cases that may be interesting for you" is a perfectly valid answer, IMHO.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
geophile 13y ago
This? This is the wisdom has has to convey after 36 years of experience? It is just the most obvious thing. I've been asking this question for as long as I've been interviewing, (adjusted as necessary, for kids just out of college, for example).
- eruditely 13y ago
  If you take enough people over articles obviousness space something will be obvious to everyone.
- eruditely 13y ago
  If you take enough people over articles obviousness space something will be obvious to everyone.
- eruditely 13y ago
  If you take enough people over articles obviousness space something will be obvious to everyone.
- eruditely 13y ago
  If you take enough people over articles obviousness space something will be obvious to everyone.
mrcactu5 13y ago
what if they haven't done their "big thing" yet? What constitutes a "significant accomplishment" anyway? * building an awesome web site ? * raising a child ? * graduating college ? * overcoming cancer ? * learning to play the piano? I do agree you will get to know somebody very quickly if you ask these kinds of question. I am 30 and I will review them in my time.
pthreads 13y ago
This is the most idiotic advice for hiring. I have seen many successful hires who were just out of school but were brilliant and went to become very successful later on in their careers.
rdl 13y ago
I strongly prefer the Aaron Patzer/"Israeli Airport" technique; walk through someone's entire resume and ask detailed questions (like this one) for each job; and try to get education and non-work projects captured as well (which really should have been highlighted by the candidate, too, but aren't always). You could actually just go purely chronologically from "earliest memory", but obviously focus on the important areas, and be aware an older candidate might have changed substantially from college-age to present day. Then, work-sample. Although in some cases (screening lots of people), a simple work-sample just as a pre-filter might make sense, particularly if you can administer it remotely/auto-grade/etc. The hiring process has twin goals: not pissing off candidates (hired OR unhired), and hiring the best people you can. Being time-efficient for candidates as well as your own staff helps a lot. Painlessly getting people in or out of the pool before a 6h interview process = win. Having a repeatable, quantitative process also seems very important, although the cases where I had to hire >3 people with a team of >10 all came with someone else's HR process so I couldn't implement too much of this.
URSpider94 13y ago
I'm going to add a top-level reply, despite having replied to a few people's posts. The first question is just a staging question. You are asking the candidate to think about a situation that you are proud of, one you will be happy talking about, and one that you hopefully remember in detail. The real meat is in all of the follow-ups -- what's called "behavioral interviewing". You're asking people to tell you about how they behaved in a real situation. For example, when there was a huge disagreement on the project, how did you solve it? How did you motive the team through a low point? Tell me about big decisions that you made that worked out, and ones that didn't. Research has shown time and time again that good behavioral interviewing is the best way to find successful employees. If it's a technical position, you clearly also need to discern their technical skills (code on the board, or submit a github resume, or the like), but these are the questions that will tell you if this is someone who will be an asset to the team in non-technical ways.
kotakota 13y ago
I think this an amazing question to ask in an interview and I have actually been asked this question in two interviews. I generally throw the interviewers off track though because I generally talk about my personal project that involves a virtual machine and a byte code compiler for the virtual machine. I actually really enjoy this part of the interview too because it gives me a chance to talk about something im passionate about while displaying my technical abilities.
yason 13y ago
Despite what people say, I think that any interviewing comes down to your gut feeling if you're any good at interviewing at all. There's no single set of questions that you can use to filter in the best or filter out the worst, except maybe the fizzbuzz like things in case you have to filter out people who actually can't code. So this question presents a nice background for talking about something that allows you to ask endless questions about it and go deeper and deeper as long as you have time. I generally like this sort of approach as people will "fold" eventually if pressed hard enough, i.e. they have to admit that they don't know something or they'll try to act like they do. And the goal of an interview is not just reach to point where people "fold" but the path travelled before reaching that point.
rrggrr 13y ago
Recruiter here: I totally disagree. The only interview question that matters is "What do you want to do?" A candidate's technical fit for a position is secondary to their interest in doing the work, all the work, the job entails. I regularly see great technical candidates fail or underachieve because the job never matched their core aspirations.
yololasaurus 13y ago
This is a great question (or leading question anyway) especially if you tell candidates ahead of time that you'll be asking them this question and setting where it leads. The best interviews I've done have always allowed the candidate (or me) to prepare.
SavvyGuard 13y ago
We need a rule on hacker news. If you submit another "this is how you do interviews" article, it needs to be backed up with testing and facts.
arbuge 13y ago
It's a useful insight given his experience although more hard data backing up the claim would have been useful. A better title would have been something along the lines of how that's a great interview opener though. As the article goes on to elaborate, you need to follow up with many other questions after that first one.
001sky 13y ago
The Only Interview Question That Matters (inc.com) Hmm. I guess if you don't count the the next #19 questions?
b0rsuk 13y ago
This question is like a Django model definition where you have a database query as default (or limit_choices_to) value. It makes it impossible to perform the 'syncdb' command (create a database from scratch, for tests etc). In other words, IT CREATES A CHICKEN&EGG problem. There are people with good potential, who will never be able to answer this question, because they were never given a chance. I was unemployed for 3 years, and I used to work in a completely different industry. The job was much like assembly line, and I couldn't even change my computer's time&date without admin's approval. Opportunities for achievements were extremely limited. So, maaaybe this is a good question, for the _employer_. But considering the fact employers are complaining about lack of qualified workforce at the same time as LOTS of people are unemployed, I think not! Today, if you ask this question, you're limiting yourself more than you think. It's similar to HR managers who ask for X years of experience in Y. Spending 4 years in your 3rd grade is not an achievement, and I seriously doubt the interviewer would be able to tell the difference.
sytelus 13y ago
I've asked this question few time and honestly it's no where close to "the one question" author makes out to be. Lot of candidates drifts on to something very complex, or describe other people's work as theirs, or make up stuff as they go. Plus it totally fails on campus hiring, one-man projects that evolves slowly over time and has legal risk of candidate disclosing sensitive information. The best interview question, IMO, is still the one that Sergey Brin used to ask: "Describe to me something that I already don't know".
elchief 13y ago
Recruiters are can shuddup, in the same way that old-school baseball scouts can shuddup. Show us the stats. Do your own Project Oxygen if you don't have the stats.
Tycho 13y ago
Cool. I always ask this question. Sometimes I even tell candidates 'and now, my favourite question.' It's not for a pure developer role though, it might not work well for that. It a chance for people to show how they've actually used the skills they claim to have, and whether they'll bring some invention and creativity to their role.

199 points by engassa 13y ago

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

rocky1138 13y ago

Can you do the job?

herge 13y ago
Can you define the job?
- madlynormal 13y ago
  Yes. Please have 5+ years experience with Javascript ES6 specification.
  - smsm42 13y ago
    That's not a job. Unless, of course, some is giving out money for just having experience with Javascript - in which case please tell me who so I can apply and get a nice income supplement while spending no time doing anything. Not holding my breath though.
collyw 13y ago
Thats an easy one to fake the correct answer though.
rocky1138 13y ago
For reference: http://www.forbes.com/sites/georgebradt/2011/04/27/top-executive-recruiters-agree-there-are-only-three-key-job-interview-questions/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/georgebradt/2011/04/27/top-execu...

jxf 13y ago

This is a pretty linkbaity oversimplification. It's designed to appeal to the belief that there's a "magic bullet" for everything. Hiring people via interviews is hard, because evaluating people with limited time and context is hard. There's no such thing as a question that will tell you everything. If you're really trying to get an accurate picture of a candidate, conduct an accurate simulation. Get away from interviews as the only means of evaluating someone, and use something that more closely approximates the actual conditions under which they'll be working. Maybe that's a probationary period where you pay them at contractor rates, or maybe you pay them to make a bugfix to an open-source project that you depend on, or whatever. Asking questions can tell you a lot about how a person thinks and works, but it's never a substitute for the real thing.

darkxanthos 13y ago
I don't see an oversimplification here. If a programmer, business person, whoever cant answer that question well I can definitely see how they might not be the kind of person I want to work with.
- kelseyfrancis 13y ago
  An answer to that question is necessary but not sufficient.
AaronBBrown 13y ago
I read this a lot here about probationary or trial periods and I agree that it's a great idea, in principle. However, the reality of the developer and system engineer ecosystem right now is that it's an employee's market. Good people are already employed and probably get a couple job leads every day via professional contacts, LinkedIn, or other channels. Those people aren't going to be willing to jump through these kinds of hoops, quit their day job, or generally want to deal with putting this much effort into an uncertain outcome when there are so many lower friction and equally rewarding positions. I realize that I'm generalizing and that you may be able to come up with a few anecdotes to make your point, but no one I know would deal with this. This might be a great way of hiring college interns or people trying to break into the technology field, but not practical for hiring established or senior positions. I like your idea about contributing to some open source project (paid), though even in that case, you will likely run into qualified people who are unwilling (or legally unable) to do this and as an interviewer, you need to be careful not to exclude those individuals.

DonPellegrino 13y ago

Good article, terrible link-baity title.

peacemaker 13y ago

As a senior guy who's been programming a long time, I honestly don't know what I'd pick in answer to this question. Partly because I've done loads of cool (and no so cool) things over the years and partly because I don't have the best memory in the world. How do you decide which past accomplishment is worthy of a 30 minute conversation? Usually what comes to mind when asked this question are simply the most recent things I've worked on. If you've had the misfortune of doing crappy work for the last few months then it makes it a bit harder. I've seen lots of these kinds of posts, trying to "solve" interviewing. It's a topic close to me right now as I'm in the middle of the interview cycle myself. I just don't think it can be solved. There are too many variables and too many non-scientific aspects to it. Most of the time interviews are decided in that first impression with your interviewer - it feels like a primal instinct people have about other people. One thing I can say though, is that you aren't going to find the perfect candidate with just one question.

duncanawoods 13y ago
Yep. This question is actually: "Tell me about a project in which you demonstrate the skills and character attributes that I am looking for without me telling you what those are." A good interviewer will ask questions like this only having given you enough context to choose the most appropriate example. A bad interviewer will not, instead believing that the less information they give you the more revealing your answers will be. All they achieve is to introduce more chance into the interview process by leading you to pick less relevant examples.
danielweber 13y ago
There are a whole bunch of "Perfect Interview Questions" that merely filter out people who have never heard them before. This is the latest on the list. I'm in job-hunt mode so I guess I'm going to sit down and prepare an answer for this one, too.
deleted 13y ago
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tootie 13y ago
I've been a pro for nearly 15 years and the project that I'm most proud of was something i did as an undergrad. Now I'm sad.

nawitus 13y ago

So what should software engineers who are "merely" doing solid and great programming on "average" and typical applications respond? It's not like programmers can pick and choose difficult projects.

eli 13y ago
They literally don't have one thing that was a significant accomplishment? Something from school? From outside work? That wouldn't be a deal breaker for me, but for someone who supposedly has a bit of experience it's a red flag.
- danielweber 13y ago
  What does "significant" mean? I've worked on many great projects that have ended up going nowhere, sometimes because the market simply didn't materialize, sometimes because management pulled the plug just before shipping, sometimes because the whole company went bankrupt because funding dried up because our lead investor was on a plane that some terrorists blew into a building. These "how to hire the best people!" articles are worse than "Cosmo" giving dating advice to teenage girls.
  - eli 13y ago
    It means whatever you want it to mean. The point is to get you talking about a project you care about. About the specifics rather than generalities. Your comment sounds like a perfectly fine answer to me. I personally would ask you which project was the most interesting to work on? Or which were you most disappointed by when it didn't ship? And why. At least, that's what I'm looking for when I ask it.
300bps 13y ago
I think you have hit the nail on the head regarding the purpose of the question. The question is used to find stars. That is, someone who is 50x more productive than programmers: "merely" doing solid and great programming on "average" and typical applications

Zigurd 13y ago

It's a good open-ended question that would bring the interviewee to the item on their resume that's actually the most indicative of their potential. This is a good tool for focusing the interview. The follow-up questions are OK, but for interviewing a coder I'd rather talk about a significant sample of their code.

coldcode 13y ago

Odd I go to the page and there is no content. I guess it doesn't matter...

aw3c2 13y ago
It requires you to enable Javascript because it is a broken website. Oddly enough there is pretty much no content then anyways. ;) The question is "What single project or task would you consider your most significant accomplishment in your career to date?" Big whoop!

Bahamut 13y ago

I don't like this question - I do a lot of things, answering this question doesn't say a lot about me. It gives a vastly incomplete picture of me. I would say that it is one of those bad generic questions.

eli 13y ago
It's hard to talk about a lot of things in an interview so the question focuses on one thing... that you get to pick. Agree that this post has a terrible title and making a hire/no hire on one question is insane, but it's a good question.
- Bahamut 13y ago
  I disagree - these are the same types of questions you might see on a college application. As far as my experience goes, it's a question that has massive flaws, especially when you deal with people who has an impressive & flexible set of skills/strengths - it selects against some of the very best, since for them, it's difficult to say what is the most significant accomplishment since many accomplishments manifest as significant in different ways. To select one is to likely avoid talk on the others, and to make a snap judgment call on the implicit question of what is significant, which may end up with a flawed answer that the interviewee may not make normally. That is why I fundamentally disagree with such a question being important for hiring. If you want to test how someone handles pressure, that can be manifested in other ways. If you want someone to discuss their accomplishments, a simple request for the person to describe some of his/her accomplishments would be less flawed (i.e. "Tell me a little about yourself and what you have done") - it would also be less confrontational.
  - robbiea 13y ago
    Why would you want to be less confrontational in an interview? The point is to see if the candidate is good or not, not "let's see how I can ask this question in the nicest way possible so I can get a nice and safe response that the candidate will just read off his / her resume". The fact is this question weeds out people who truly havent' done anything difficult or unable to communicate their achievements properly. If you have an impressive set of skill / strength, then it should be easy enough for you to pick one. In my mind the question forces the candidate to show the interviewer his / her: 1) Communication skills (i.e, is this person going to tell me all their problems, or just the one major problem that he/she needs help with) 2) What they view as an accomplishment or challenge 3) How they handle challenges 4) Their ambition (i.e, did they take a leadership position in their accomplishment or did they sit back and let everyone lead the project)

pg 13y ago

"What single project or task would you consider your most significant accomplishment in your career to date?" If this is the best question you can ask people, we got really lucky, because this is the essential question on all YC's application forms for events (e.g. Startup School) and has been one of the core questions on the YC application since the beginning.

danmaz74 13y ago
On the other hand, in my experience, the question works much better when asked in person than in writing. Just seeing the face of the interviewee while you ask the question lets you understand if there is real passion for that kind of job; the answers I get in writing these days (ie by email while screening people) are unfortunately much less telling :(
- jseliger 13y ago
  Just seeing the face of the interviewee while you ask the question lets you understand if there is real passion for that kind of job; Is this deceptively informative? I hate to cite Malcolm Gladwell but I do think Blink shows us that first impressions and fleeting impressions can be dangerous and wrong. What do we think "real passion" is? Does it really show on the face, or do we only think we know? Can being flustered or off-kilter skew the impressions we give?
  - danmaz74 13y ago
    To be clear, I don't care what "real passion" really is. I just care about selecting a candidate who is interested in what we work on, and not just for the money. Interviewing is just a screening process, and of course fluster increases the risk of a false negative, but in that situation I'm much more concerned with false positives, and in that respect: No, watching also the body language for that kind of question isn't deceptively informative; it's much more informative than reading the same answer from a written text.
  - afterburner 13y ago
    I thought Blink primarily showed how first impressions can be more correct than considered and careful reasoning.

rubiquity 13y ago

The Only Interview Question Followed By 18 Other Questions That Matter

jessriedel 13y ago

Not sure if the reasoning is the same, but I always thought academics should be judged by their few very best ideas. Applying for your first postdoc: What's your best idea? Assistant prof: what are your two best papers? Tenure decision: what are your 5 best papers? Everyone likes to churn out a list of triple digit publications, but 99% of those will have no discernible impact on the world.

kabdib 13y ago

I've been in the industry for 35 years now (and hacking computers before that). If I picked just one accomplishment, I'd have to choose just one from all the accomplishments that I'm equally proud of. Furthermore, if I chose one from earlier in my career, one which was really neat and a lot of fun and technically sweet and saved the project's bacon, you might think I'd not done much interesting stuff since then. If you ask this, you're not going to get much actual data. You won't see me write code, you won't see me react to something totally new. I might ask this during a screening interview, but it's a soft question that should lead into more concrete technical assessments. So: Meh. No silver bullet.

jballanc 13y ago

Eh...forgive me for saying, but this is a bit of a cop-out. Especially where the author notes that you then have to supplement this "one question" with 20 min of follow-up. It's essentially saying "the only interview question that matters is having an interview". I'm not saying that this doesn't work. I've been through my fair share of interviews on both sides of the table, and focusing an interview on various dimensions of a single project is a far, far better strategy than the typical haphazard array of semi-related questions on people skills and technical ability. Really, I think it's not even so important that you focus on the "that you're most proud of" part. This tack would work just as well, I suspect, with the interviewees second or third most notable accomplishment. What's important is that it is a project of sufficient size that you can ask the follow-ups, and in doing so construct a consistent picture of the candidate as an employee. If you really want one question to get the most information from someone, my goto has always been: "What is your current favorite language/framework/technology stack? What do you hate about it?" Ok, so technically that's two (or one two-part question), but I've found that this question will very quickly reveal how able someone is to think critically and to assess all facets of the decisions that they make.

danielweber 13y ago
Sounds like "Pick some job from your resume, and let's talk about it." Which is pretty effective.
platz 13y ago
Well sure, if you've interviewing folks without many/any accomplishments under their belt, that question wouldn't work as well.

randallsquared 13y ago

This will get you a successful candidate who can talk at length about something they might have done. If talking is the bulk of the job, congratulations. If the job involves actually doing something requiring some skill, perhaps you should be testing for the skill, rather than ability to tell a (possibly true!) story. Surely everyone has worked with that person who is confident and charismatic, who inspires confidence in everyone who hasn't (for example) read their code, but who produces negative work every day on the job. When that person eventually leaves (perhaps after spending months or years being shuffled around to the places they can do the least harm by their peers), they will have no problem finding a lucrative job elsewhere, because they are easy and fun to talk to, and can go on for hours about the very important projects they were on.

tptacek 13y ago

I see how this one interview question is expansive and sets up a line of followup questions. I don't see why it's a good question. Presume you get an good answer to the question and every followup question. Now tell me this: how much more do you know about how capable the candidate is of doing the job you're hiring for? And, were these questions the fastest, most accurate way of learning that? I submit: no. "What were the biggest challenges you faced"? How do I assess the answer to that question? How do I compare it with answers from other candidates? How do I track, over time, which challenges correlate to strong performance in the actual role we're hiring for? "Explain your manager's style and whether you liked it"? Come on. Don't virtually all of these questions ask me to read tea leaves, to get a sense of whether I "like" or "respect" the candidate? That's not the same thing as learning whether the candidate will do a good job. Oh, and good luck hiring anyone right out of college this way.

logicallee 13y ago
Because some people cap at "I managed to code the most lines of code in June, 2006 among my seven colleagues, even though I was just hired on the tenth of the month and didn't know the code yet. That was quite a month." whereas others cap at, "well, I did manage to build the world's first and largest bitcoin currency exchange and reach volumes of about a million a day before we had to shut down." when you find out they did it by themselves, that is a huge difference. like two orders of magnitude FTE's. it's like, if some guy spearheaded and came up with the whole idea behind the new Mac Pro, in an era of stagnant desktops, the whole mechanics and central idea (with the heat core). This question lets you know this. a million examples, this is really just one.
- tptacek 13y ago
  So this one interview question allows you to make the decision between hiring someone who has only worked in the profession for a month and hiring someone who wrote a whole bitcoin exchange. Faint praise. The big issue is, what does this style of interviewing do for you with a real-world candidate selection challenge --- say, 3 developers, all similar on paper? There is no reason the best candidate necessarily has the best story. The story of your "best accomplishment" has as much to do with random chance as it does with capability. This question demands that an interview somehow de-confound the luck element and the skill element. And to what end? Even if you got a clean reading on this question, somehow equalized between the candidates, I ask again: do you really know a lot more about how the candidate will actually perform on the job? Because that is almost the only question that matters in candidate selection.

Jare 13y ago

How about: "Let me tell you about a few of my accomplishments and then I'd love to hear which one you think is most significant for the kind of work I'd do in your organization" Interviews go both ways.

lyndonh 13y ago
Absolutely. These articles are always aimed at the candidate. Where are the articles about "The most important question the interviewer has to be able to answer" ? e.g. How are (you/the guy who's going to manage me) going to enable me to do great things here ? What's the most (important project/major change), that was proposed by someone in this kind of position, that has gone into production ? If I do this job well, where do you expect me to be in 5 years time ?

mrfusion 13y ago

I'll have a couple good accomplishments on the job every year but nothing jumps out at me as the biggest accomplishment of my life. How should I answer? Just pick out a recent one I guess. Does anyone else have this problem?

fit2rule 13y ago

I don't agree with this sentiment .. I think this is a very shallow approach to evaluating people on the basis of their past accomplishments, and also somewhat presumptuous to consider that they might 'outdo' their past accomplishments just by working for you. Therefore in my opinon the most important interview question to ask is this: "Do you want to work here?" .. followed up by: "Why do you want to work here?" If the answers to these two questions don't jive with what you need/want as an employer, then there are no further questions to ask.

throaway9091 13y ago

It's all a nice way of saying: Employer: "How low can I pay you, and how many hours will you work?" Candidate: "I can't compete with the H1B slaves." Employer: "Oh, okay. Then let me give you a tricky whiteboard question and reject you based on that, so you don't sue me."

smsm42 13y ago
I've never seen pay discussed in hitech at the same place as technical competency - and never before such competency is asserted. It is pretty stupid to bargain about something if you have not even a slightest idea how valuable it is. Of course, interviewing for some job where only headcount matters is different.

bowlofpetunias 13y ago

I'm 46 years old. You want me to pick one? I mean, I get it, I use this question regularly as an interviewer, but if you have me on the other side of the table, you're giving me a lot of room to tell you exactly the story you want to hear... Especially if you pull this question out of the bag late in the process, when I you've already given me enough insight in what would impress you. Like most interview tactics, it's very context sensitive. There is no silver bullet for interviews, and certainly not only one question that matters.

smsm42 13y ago
"I can't pick one but here's couple of recent cases that may be interesting for you" is a perfectly valid answer, IMHO.

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geophile 13y ago

This? This is the wisdom has has to convey after 36 years of experience? It is just the most obvious thing. I've been asking this question for as long as I've been interviewing, (adjusted as necessary, for kids just out of college, for example).

eruditely 13y ago
If you take enough people over articles obviousness space something will be obvious to everyone.
eruditely 13y ago
If you take enough people over articles obviousness space something will be obvious to everyone.
eruditely 13y ago
If you take enough people over articles obviousness space something will be obvious to everyone.
eruditely 13y ago
If you take enough people over articles obviousness space something will be obvious to everyone.

mrcactu5 13y ago

what if they haven't done their "big thing" yet? What constitutes a "significant accomplishment" anyway? * building an awesome web site ? * raising a child ? * graduating college ? * overcoming cancer ? * learning to play the piano? I do agree you will get to know somebody very quickly if you ask these kinds of question. I am 30 and I will review them in my time.

pthreads 13y ago

This is the most idiotic advice for hiring. I have seen many successful hires who were just out of school but were brilliant and went to become very successful later on in their careers.

rdl 13y ago

I strongly prefer the Aaron Patzer/"Israeli Airport" technique; walk through someone's entire resume and ask detailed questions (like this one) for each job; and try to get education and non-work projects captured as well (which really should have been highlighted by the candidate, too, but aren't always). You could actually just go purely chronologically from "earliest memory", but obviously focus on the important areas, and be aware an older candidate might have changed substantially from college-age to present day. Then, work-sample. Although in some cases (screening lots of people), a simple work-sample just as a pre-filter might make sense, particularly if you can administer it remotely/auto-grade/etc. The hiring process has twin goals: not pissing off candidates (hired OR unhired), and hiring the best people you can. Being time-efficient for candidates as well as your own staff helps a lot. Painlessly getting people in or out of the pool before a 6h interview process = win. Having a repeatable, quantitative process also seems very important, although the cases where I had to hire >3 people with a team of >10 all came with someone else's HR process so I couldn't implement too much of this.

URSpider94 13y ago

I'm going to add a top-level reply, despite having replied to a few people's posts. The first question is just a staging question. You are asking the candidate to think about a situation that you are proud of, one you will be happy talking about, and one that you hopefully remember in detail. The real meat is in all of the follow-ups -- what's called "behavioral interviewing". You're asking people to tell you about how they behaved in a real situation. For example, when there was a huge disagreement on the project, how did you solve it? How did you motive the team through a low point? Tell me about big decisions that you made that worked out, and ones that didn't. Research has shown time and time again that good behavioral interviewing is the best way to find successful employees. If it's a technical position, you clearly also need to discern their technical skills (code on the board, or submit a github resume, or the like), but these are the questions that will tell you if this is someone who will be an asset to the team in non-technical ways.

kotakota 13y ago

I think this an amazing question to ask in an interview and I have actually been asked this question in two interviews. I generally throw the interviewers off track though because I generally talk about my personal project that involves a virtual machine and a byte code compiler for the virtual machine. I actually really enjoy this part of the interview too because it gives me a chance to talk about something im passionate about while displaying my technical abilities.

yason 13y ago

Despite what people say, I think that any interviewing comes down to your gut feeling if you're any good at interviewing at all. There's no single set of questions that you can use to filter in the best or filter out the worst, except maybe the fizzbuzz like things in case you have to filter out people who actually can't code. So this question presents a nice background for talking about something that allows you to ask endless questions about it and go deeper and deeper as long as you have time. I generally like this sort of approach as people will "fold" eventually if pressed hard enough, i.e. they have to admit that they don't know something or they'll try to act like they do. And the goal of an interview is not just reach to point where people "fold" but the path travelled before reaching that point.

rrggrr 13y ago

Recruiter here: I totally disagree. The only interview question that matters is "What do you want to do?" A candidate's technical fit for a position is secondary to their interest in doing the work, all the work, the job entails. I regularly see great technical candidates fail or underachieve because the job never matched their core aspirations.

yololasaurus 13y ago

This is a great question (or leading question anyway) especially if you tell candidates ahead of time that you'll be asking them this question and setting where it leads. The best interviews I've done have always allowed the candidate (or me) to prepare.

SavvyGuard 13y ago

We need a rule on hacker news. If you submit another "this is how you do interviews" article, it needs to be backed up with testing and facts.

arbuge 13y ago

It's a useful insight given his experience although more hard data backing up the claim would have been useful. A better title would have been something along the lines of how that's a great interview opener though. As the article goes on to elaborate, you need to follow up with many other questions after that first one.

001sky 13y ago

The Only Interview Question That Matters (inc.com) Hmm. I guess if you don't count the the next #19 questions?

b0rsuk 13y ago

This question is like a Django model definition where you have a database query as default (or limit_choices_to) value. It makes it impossible to perform the 'syncdb' command (create a database from scratch, for tests etc). In other words, IT CREATES A CHICKEN&EGG problem. There are people with good potential, who will never be able to answer this question, because they were never given a chance. I was unemployed for 3 years, and I used to work in a completely different industry. The job was much like assembly line, and I couldn't even change my computer's time&date without admin's approval. Opportunities for achievements were extremely limited. So, maaaybe this is a good question, for the _employer_. But considering the fact employers are complaining about lack of qualified workforce at the same time as LOTS of people are unemployed, I think not! Today, if you ask this question, you're limiting yourself more than you think. It's similar to HR managers who ask for X years of experience in Y. Spending 4 years in your 3rd grade is not an achievement, and I seriously doubt the interviewer would be able to tell the difference.

sytelus 13y ago

I've asked this question few time and honestly it's no where close to "the one question" author makes out to be. Lot of candidates drifts on to something very complex, or describe other people's work as theirs, or make up stuff as they go. Plus it totally fails on campus hiring, one-man projects that evolves slowly over time and has legal risk of candidate disclosing sensitive information. The best interview question, IMO, is still the one that Sergey Brin used to ask: "Describe to me something that I already don't know".

elchief 13y ago

Recruiters are can shuddup, in the same way that old-school baseball scouts can shuddup. Show us the stats. Do your own Project Oxygen if you don't have the stats.

Tycho 13y ago

Cool. I always ask this question. Sometimes I even tell candidates 'and now, my favourite question.' It's not for a pure developer role though, it might not work well for that. It a chance for people to show how they've actually used the skills they claim to have, and whether they'll bring some invention and creativity to their role.