Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: How do I improve my answer to “Tell me about a project you worked on”

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 35 posts

Re: Ask HN: How do I improve my answer to “Tell me about a project you worked on”

#11

Post by b20000 »

alex_lav wrote: post #10
Sajarin wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Ultimately the point of the question is A.) To tell if you're lying about your experience You’re the one who suggested the idea, that the question is a way to tell if a candidate is lying about their experience.

Right, among other things and not “on the spot”. And I would argue that being unable to communicate about your experience is, to an interviewer, pretty similar to lying as they’re just a candidate making unverifiable claims. Many people lie about their experience. Usually it’s glaringly obvious.

your answer makes it clear that you must not have built anything yourself of substantial size or complexity. if you worked on something for 10-15 years chances are you cannot answer some random specific question about that project because you haven’t worked on that particular part of the code base recently. so that does not mean you are lying about having built the thing.

my point is that assuming everyone is lying, biases you to the extent you want the outcome to be that the person is lying such that you can pat yourself on the back for a good job done rather than coming to the awkward conclusion you were wrong. and that is a real problem in interviewing because it means you discard top candidates.

Re: Ask HN: How do I improve my answer to “Tell me about a project you worked on”

#12

Post by alex_lav »

b20000 wrote: post #11
alex_lav wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, among other things and not “on the spot”. And I would argue that being unable to communicate about your experience is, to an interviewer, pretty similar to lying as they’re just a candidate making unverifiable claims. Many people lie about their experience. Usually it’s glaringly obvious.

your answer makes it clear that you must not have built anything yourself of substantial size or complexity. if you worked on something for 10-15 years chances are you cannot answer some random specific question about that project because you haven’t worked on that particular part of the code base recently. so that does not mean you are lying about having built the thing. my point is that assuming everyone is lying,…

> your answer makes it clear that you must not have built anything yourself of substantial size or complexity.

lol

> if you worked on something for 10-15 years chances are you cannot answer some random specific question

Again, the "random specific question" we're discussing is "Tell me about a project you worked on." So, again, if you can't answer "Tell me about a project you worked on", if you're claiming to have worked on that project for 10-15 years...I suspect there's something larger at play than just an inability to communicate about one's experience.

> so that does not mean you are lying about having built the thing.

I can and do routinely answer these types of questions about my work without issue. So nope.

> my point is that assuming everyone is lying,

Is verifying that someone isn't lying the same as assuming they are? (Hint: no).

> and that is a real problem in interviewing because it means you discard top candidates.

I would guess fewer than .1% of "top candidates" fail interviews at the "Tell me about a project you worked on" stage.

Re: Ask HN: How do I improve my answer to “Tell me about a project you worked on”

#13

Post by naruhodo »

> "memorize my lines"?

Be humble. Be honest. Be authentic. Practice by imagining the situation, by all means, but be yourself. Exaggerating your ability or outright lying will require increased cognitive load. And the truth will out, eventually.

If you struggled, say so, and talk about how you overcame your difficulties. Pretty much every project I have ever worked on included some new technology that was unfamiliar. So I had to do various things to learn that new tech. The fact that I did not know some specific technology was not a downside; the fact that I was able to learn it, or more generally, the fact that I was able to overcome a problem was an upside.

Re: Ask HN: How do I improve my answer to “Tell me about a project you worked on”

#14

Post by b20000 »

alex_lav wrote: post #12
b20000 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

your answer makes it clear that you must not have built anything yourself of substantial size or complexity. if you worked on something for 10-15 years chances are you cannot answer some random specific question about that project because you haven’t worked on that particular part of the code base recently. so that does not mean you are lying about having built the thing. my point is that assuming everyone is lying,…

> your answer makes it clear that you must not have built anything yourself of substantial size or complexity. lol > if you worked on something for 10-15 years chances are you cannot answer some random specific question Again, the "random specific question" we're discussing is "Tell me about a project you worked on." So, again, if you can't answer "Tell me about a project you worked on", if you're claiming to have wo…

"Tell me about a project you worked on." is not a specific question

"why did you choose to order the members of this struct in your C code the way you did" is one.

Re: Ask HN: How do I improve my answer to “Tell me about a project you worked on”

#15

Post by tekla »

How are you not able to answer this even in a minimal way? You have memory issues and the first thing you go to is "memorize my lines?"

Even a child should be able to answer "what cool shit have you done" in a barely minimum way.

"What cool shit did you work on this week"

"I built this really cool lego set from blocks and customized it with stuff"

Is this that hard?

Re: Ask HN: How do I improve my answer to “Tell me about a project you worked on”

#16

Post by john-radio »

Someone1234 wrote: post #3

Here is what I did (I have no idea if this is helpful): - Pulled all my changeset comments within the range I care about. - Put them into Excel and strip dupes, shorts, and general cleanup (e.g. remove anything with "fix" + "bug"/"exception"/"crash" in it). - Put the remainder into ChatGPT and ask it to make me a bullet list of my projects. - Expand and clean up the resulting bullet list by hand. Then take that to in…

What are changeset comments? Like the git log?

Re: Ask HN: How do I improve my answer to “Tell me about a project you worked on”

#18

Post by alex_lav »

b20000 wrote: post #14
alex_lav wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> your answer makes it clear that you must not have built anything yourself of substantial size or complexity. lol > if you worked on something for 10-15 years chances are you cannot answer some random specific question Again, the "random specific question" we're discussing is "Tell me about a project you worked on." So, again, if you can't answer "Tell me about a project you worked on", if you're claiming to have wo…

"Tell me about a project you worked on." is not a specific question "why did you choose to order the members of this struct in your C code the way you did" is one.

> "Tell me about a project you worked on." is not a specific question

Exactly. That's the point.

> "why did you choose to order the members of this struct in your C code the way you did" is one.

Neat!

I'll leave this chain now. This does not seem productive.

Re: Ask HN: How do I improve my answer to “Tell me about a project you worked on”

#19

Post by Yiin »

tekla wrote: post #15

How are you not able to answer this even in a minimal way? You have memory issues and the first thing you go to is "memorize my lines?" Even a child should be able to answer "what cool shit have you done" in a barely minimum way. "What cool shit did you work on this week" "I built this really cool lego set from blocks and customized it with stuff" Is this that hard?

personally it's hard when the stuff I do doesn't seem that cool to me. What for others looks like "cool Lego set build" for me might be "I arranged blocks in expected manner" and my mind wouldn't even consider that as a possible answer.

Re: Ask HN: How do I improve my answer to “Tell me about a project you worked on”

#20

Post by syndicatedjelly »

chiefalchemist wrote: post #2

I field that question but I don't like it. In a word, it's lazy. The interviewers has my CV, why not say, "Tell me about Proj X you mentioned..." I've had two interviews in the last week and I'm not sure why they bothered. Both came off as disengaged. Both probably didn't prep for the conversion. Both asked that question. Yawn.

How else is someone supposed to learn about your work experience, other than directly asking about it? How much research are they supposed to do ahead of time? Not everyone's code is publicly available on GitHub, and no sane interviewer has time to sit around reading every single line of code that each of their candidates has written. Summarizing each of your major professional projects of your career in a few minutes is really not a whole lot to ask.

I really don't get this extreme aversion of software engineers to answering any sort of question in an interview that requires a marginal amount of thinking. This attitude comes off as extremely disingenuous, and at the very least indicates that they have something to hide about their experience. If they took tests in school the same way they answer interview questions, they would have flunked out of first semester.

Post reply on HN