8 ms·

This is a sentiment I hear expressed a lot: > But I wanted to appear smart, so I didn’t express any confusion. And I don't get it. When I ask questions, if an

This is a sentiment I hear expressed a lot: > But I wanted to appear smart, so I didn’t express any confusion. And I don't get it. When I ask questions, if anything, I get told that I seem smarter for it. Asking questions is a sign that you're paying attention and actively trying to understand things. I don't think I've ever had anyone question my intelligence for asking questions for clarification. (I'm not trying to criticize the OP in particular for this. I've heard it from a lot of places, and wanted to point out the fallacy.)

lotyrin 12y ago
Yep. This has been the primary source of frustration for me in my communicating with software developer peers. I'll explain the task I'm delegating carefully: why it exists, the big picture of how it should be implemented, what tradeoffs I feel like will need to be made, and what corner cases are likely to exist and they'll nod like they understand to defend their ego then go and implement roughly none of it.
- jmilloy 12y ago
  It makes testing for this behavior important, and it sounds like the OP exhibited just this behavior, doesn't realize it, and blames the interview technique despite it ascertaining exactly what it needed to.
Klinky 12y ago
Perhaps you've just never been criticized or had someone look at you like you were stupid. Maybe you've never had someone dismiss your concerns immediately, give you a rushed response which has nothing to do with your question, and act like they had to do the work for you. This happens all the time, in all areas of life. I am impressed you've never run into it.
- rcthompson 12y ago
  There's a difference between "I think you're stupid because you're asking questions" and "I don't have the time/patience/interest/whatever to answer your questions." I've certainly encountered my share of the latter, but I don't interpret it as an insult to my intelligence. (Or even worse, there's also "I don't like your questions because my idea won't stand up to close scrutiny." I get that every once in a while too.)
joshvm 12y ago
I've long shrugged off the shame of asking stupid questions. You see this phenomena throughout school, university (though for God's sake after the lecture, please) and in the workplace. People are afraid of looking stupid so they sit on their thumbs waiting for things to magically click. This goes a long way when you're talking to clients or partners too. You often need to ask questions that will appear stupid to them, but that you don't know the answer to. They normally take it that you actually care about the job/problem, and often you'll gain some important insight that you otherwise wouldn't know.
- thothamon 12y ago
  Same here. I am always the first guy in a group to ask the stupid question. Almost never do I get a snide response. If I did get a snide response to a clarifying question in an interview, it would be an almost certain signal that I should run away from this company. Their rudeness is actually a favor, potentially sparing me months or years of unpleasantness in their company.
wging 12y ago
> But I wanted to appear smart, so I didn’t express any confusion. In fact some interviews are intended to flush out behavior like this. Give a candidate an ambiguous problem statement, and see if they ask the necessary clarifying questions. This meta-problem (ambiguous problems/unclear goals) happens all the time in the real world and bringing clarity to situations like this is a good skill to have.
- x0x0 12y ago
  True story of how an interview exploded for me: I'm asked to code a simple matrix in java. I ask about the fill factor, and get told quite low. The constructor takes the dimension and it's assumed square. I ask the interviewer if a csc matrix is ok, and he kind of says he's not sure what a csc matrix is. I tell him it's column sparse, and proceed to quickly write out, on a whiteboard, a simple csc matrix -- basically, an array of dimension columns of ArrayList of tuple <index, value>. The constructor is pretty much ArrayList<Tuple>[] columns; void SparseCSCMatrix(int dim){ columns = new ArrayList<Tuple>[ dim ]; } The interviewer then starts going at me because having, eg, a million columns requires an array with a million elements in it. I say yes, duh. He says it's quite inefficient -- what if I only use 10 columns out of the million? My response is, well, that's fine -- but what you're describing isn't a matrix. It turns out that what he really wanted was a HashMap from tuple: (x idx, y idx) to value, and that a typical load would be perhaps 1k elements in a space of 1 million by 1 million. We then go at it about whether I should have asked him to clarify, and I basically decide I don't have to play along with stupid gotcha questions so I told him words have meanings and a "matrix" with only 10 non-empty columns is not a matrix. And I don't have time for wankers. At least I learned what they were like fast...
  - wging 12y ago
    I think I disagree. What he wanted can certainly be called a matrix. An m-by-n matrix has an entry for every (x, y), 0<=x<m 0<=y<n, but that's not a description of the way to represent a matrix in memory. That is an implementation decision. Of course I wasn't there, and I don't know the fine details that got you mad.
  - 12y ago
giaour 12y ago
I always think candidates seem smarter when they ask questions to clarify the interview questions, even if they're just disambiguation questions like, "did you say 'infinity' or 'infinitely'?"

lotyrin 12y ago

Yep. This has been the primary source of frustration for me in my communicating with software developer peers. I'll explain the task I'm delegating carefully: why it exists, the big picture of how it should be implemented, what tradeoffs I feel like will need to be made, and what corner cases are likely to exist and they'll nod like they understand to defend their ego then go and implement roughly none of it.

jmilloy 12y ago
It makes testing for this behavior important, and it sounds like the OP exhibited just this behavior, doesn't realize it, and blames the interview technique despite it ascertaining exactly what it needed to.

Klinky 12y ago

Perhaps you've just never been criticized or had someone look at you like you were stupid. Maybe you've never had someone dismiss your concerns immediately, give you a rushed response which has nothing to do with your question, and act like they had to do the work for you. This happens all the time, in all areas of life. I am impressed you've never run into it.

rcthompson 12y ago
There's a difference between "I think you're stupid because you're asking questions" and "I don't have the time/patience/interest/whatever to answer your questions." I've certainly encountered my share of the latter, but I don't interpret it as an insult to my intelligence. (Or even worse, there's also "I don't like your questions because my idea won't stand up to close scrutiny." I get that every once in a while too.)

joshvm 12y ago

I've long shrugged off the shame of asking stupid questions. You see this phenomena throughout school, university (though for God's sake after the lecture, please) and in the workplace. People are afraid of looking stupid so they sit on their thumbs waiting for things to magically click. This goes a long way when you're talking to clients or partners too. You often need to ask questions that will appear stupid to them, but that you don't know the answer to. They normally take it that you actually care about the job/problem, and often you'll gain some important insight that you otherwise wouldn't know.

thothamon 12y ago
Same here. I am always the first guy in a group to ask the stupid question. Almost never do I get a snide response. If I did get a snide response to a clarifying question in an interview, it would be an almost certain signal that I should run away from this company. Their rudeness is actually a favor, potentially sparing me months or years of unpleasantness in their company.

wging 12y ago

> But I wanted to appear smart, so I didn’t express any confusion. In fact some interviews are intended to flush out behavior like this. Give a candidate an ambiguous problem statement, and see if they ask the necessary clarifying questions. This meta-problem (ambiguous problems/unclear goals) happens all the time in the real world and bringing clarity to situations like this is a good skill to have.

x0x0 12y ago
True story of how an interview exploded for me: I'm asked to code a simple matrix in java. I ask about the fill factor, and get told quite low. The constructor takes the dimension and it's assumed square. I ask the interviewer if a csc matrix is ok, and he kind of says he's not sure what a csc matrix is. I tell him it's column sparse, and proceed to quickly write out, on a whiteboard, a simple csc matrix -- basically, an array of dimension columns of ArrayList of tuple <index, value>. The constructor is pretty much ArrayList<Tuple>[] columns; void SparseCSCMatrix(int dim){ columns = new ArrayList<Tuple>[ dim ]; } The interviewer then starts going at me because having, eg, a million columns requires an array with a million elements in it. I say yes, duh. He says it's quite inefficient -- what if I only use 10 columns out of the million? My response is, well, that's fine -- but what you're describing isn't a matrix. It turns out that what he really wanted was a HashMap from tuple: (x idx, y idx) to value, and that a typical load would be perhaps 1k elements in a space of 1 million by 1 million. We then go at it about whether I should have asked him to clarify, and I basically decide I don't have to play along with stupid gotcha questions so I told him words have meanings and a "matrix" with only 10 non-empty columns is not a matrix. And I don't have time for wankers. At least I learned what they were like fast...
- wging 12y ago
  I think I disagree. What he wanted can certainly be called a matrix. An m-by-n matrix has an entry for every (x, y), 0<=x<m 0<=y<n, but that's not a description of the way to represent a matrix in memory. That is an implementation decision. Of course I wasn't there, and I don't know the fine details that got you mad.
- 12y ago

giaour 12y ago

I always think candidates seem smarter when they ask questions to clarify the interview questions, even if they're just disambiguation questions like, "did you say 'infinity' or 'infinitely'?"