What are some job interview questions that can be used to reject candidates regardless of how they answer? (Double Bind.)
Ask HN: What are job interview questions that can be used to reject regardless
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Re: Ask HN: What are job interview questions that can be used to reject regardless
#2A very long time ago, for a job not in the software industry, I had to take one of those multiple-choice exams they use to screen employees. There were probably 100 questions. One of the questions was something like "Have you ever been dishonest?". I probably dishonestly answered that question (with a no) and was thus probably red-flagged by the "Machine" and never proceeded in the interview process.
Re: Ask HN: What are job interview questions that can be used to reject regardless
#3Not an interview question itself, but rejecting based on lack of "culture fit" seems to be pretty standard practice. I'm not sure why such a trick question is even needed however, since regardless of how the candidate does the decision to hire is ultimately a black-box that the candidate won't know anything about.
Re: Ask HN: What are job interview questions that can be used to reject regardless
#4"Tell us a story about how you took down production."
A reasonable question. But if you really need to reject the candidate (for instance, if you're attempting to resist, or provide cover for resisting, someone brought in e.g. by the bad kind of nepotism), no matter how much they talk about how it led them to build systems to prevent similar disasters, as an interviewer you can selectively choose to focus on the mindset that led them to break the system in the first place.
In general, though, if you're looking for ways to disqualify a candidate based on other than merit, you should examine your own biases against the candidate. Don't be evil.
Re: Ask HN: What are job interview questions that can be used to reject regardless
#5You can reject a candidate based on any conversation you may have, regardless of what they say. But why?
Re: Ask HN: What are job interview questions that can be used to reject regardless
#6Tell me about a time you put your own self-interest ahead of your employer's.
Re: Ask HN: What are job interview questions that can be used to reject regardless
#7"Tell us a story about how you took down production." A reasonable question. But if you really need to reject the candidate (for instance, if you're attempting to resist, or provide cover for resisting, someone brought in e.g. by the bad kind of nepotism), no matter how much they talk about how it led them to build systems to prevent similar disasters, as an interviewer you can selectively choose to focus on the mind…
"Tell us a story about how you took down production."
We had a real need for batch queries, so I built a declarative batch query mechanism for our in-house ORM. To do this, we needed to make actual objects representing database relations. Unfortunately, the "collections of lambdas" we were using as an ORM had started getting polluted with buisness logic. So I used a parser/rewrite engine to match the un-polluted DB transformation lambdas and to substitute DB column and relation objects implementing the same logic in the un-polluted lambdas.
I checked in a massive change affecting 2500 of the ~5000 lambdas, syntactically matching the logic in all 2500 of those with the parser framework, and then also vetted everything by hand. I was 100% sure the logic was duplicated exactly. This would allow us to introduce the objects, and it would also stop the march of business logic into the DB framework. Everything checked out in QA, so we moved it to production.
Production immediately came to a screeching halt. However, in under an hour, I discovered that a coworker had polluted an even lower level of the ORM framework with business logic. (The code that called the lambdas in the first place.) We replicated that logic in the new framework, and everything worked 100%. I also came out a huge hero in the end, because the batch query mechanism I introduced reduced the average number of queries for opening a portfolio from ~2500 to only 50, and because it was declarative, it could be reused by any programmer very easily.
Re: Ask HN: What are job interview questions that can be used to reject regardless
#8Not an interview question itself, but rejecting based on lack of "culture fit" seems to be pretty standard practice. I'm not sure why such a trick question is even needed however, since regardless of how the candidate does the decision to hire is ultimately a black-box that the candidate won't know anything about.
I think the OPis asking for something that can be used for internal debate/procedures, not the reason communicated to candidates.
Re: Ask HN: What are job interview questions that can be used to reject regardless
#9Any question works for this:
• What's your favorite color?
• What are your weaknesses?
• What are your strengths?
• When's the last time you did something unethical?
Re: Ask HN: What are job interview questions that can be used to reject regardless
#10"Tell us a story about how you took down production." A reasonable question. But if you really need to reject the candidate (for instance, if you're attempting to resist, or provide cover for resisting, someone brought in e.g. by the bad kind of nepotism), no matter how much they talk about how it led them to build systems to prevent similar disasters, as an interviewer you can selectively choose to focus on the mind…
"Tell us a story about how you took down production." We had a real need for batch queries, so I built a declarative batch query mechanism for our in-house ORM. To do this, we needed to make actual objects representing database relations. Unfortunately, the "collections of lambdas" we were using as an ORM had started getting polluted with buisness logic. So I used a parser/rewrite engine to match the un-polluted DB t…
> Production immediately came to a screeching halt. However, in under an hour, I discovered that a coworker had polluted an even lower level of the ORM framework with business logic.
"I see. So you failed to communicate effectively with a coworker, which resulted in an hour of downtime. I didn't hear you mention anything about seeing this as a problem, let alone addressing it. Thanks for your time."