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WTF with high school questions?

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41–50 of 238 posts

Re: WTF with high school questions?

#41

I think canonical gets a bunch of applications so they make the barriers to entry sufficiently annoying so only those who are truly interested will complete the application. FYI I balked at the same step in the application process.

truly interested = truly desperate.

Re: WTF with high school questions?

#43

This is dumb. If you don't want to apply, don't. If you think something is no one else's business, don't tell them. But don't cry when they discard your application because they think it IS relevant, because shockingly you don't personally have a monopoly on truth...

Canonical makes infrastructure that I (and a significant slice of the world economy) depend on. If they want to significantly bias their application pool to people who are willing to tolerate that question, then I'm a bit concerned that I've invested years and years building on a decaying foundation, and now I have to investigate.

Re: WTF with high school questions?

#44

Why do recruiters have such trouble with such a simple task like gauging a candidate's real skills? Seriously. Here is how to do it. I'm looking for a React Developer, I ask the following simple questions: 1. Tell my about your contributions to major projects you have been involved in. (if they share their work ask more in-depth questions about it) 2. With $givenTechnologyStack, how do you usually solve state managem…

Recruiters are not technical interviewers. They're testing your communication skills, if anything at all.

Re: WTF with high school questions?

#45
post #25

While I agree that questions about High School are dumb, if a candidate answered the question with "this question is irrelevant" in a free-form text field (as they did in the screenshot), I would probably thing twice about hiring the person.

"I got kicked out of English for insubordination"

oh, and the blogger gave a smarta* answer to a free-form text question?

Yep, insubordination is still there. I'd pass on this candidate too.

Re: WTF with high school questions?

#46

This is dumb. If you don't want to apply, don't. If you think something is no one else's business, don't tell them. But don't cry when they discard your application because they think it IS relevant, because shockingly you don't personally have a monopoly on truth...

There's a difference between starting a discussion around a topic you find unprincipled and "crying".

With your logic we should never question anything or anyone because positing our own truth is irrelevant.

Re: WTF with high school questions?

#47

Why do recruiters have such trouble with such a simple task like gauging a candidate's real skills? Seriously. Here is how to do it. I'm looking for a React Developer, I ask the following simple questions: 1. Tell my about your contributions to major projects you have been involved in. (if they share their work ask more in-depth questions about it) 2. With $givenTechnologyStack, how do you usually solve state managem…

Yeah, agreed with the other comment. Recruiters wouldn't be able to do 1.a of your suggestion, let alone 2, 3.

Re: WTF with high school questions?

#48
post #25

While I agree that questions about High School are dumb, if a candidate answered the question with "this question is irrelevant" in a free-form text field (as they did in the screenshot), I would probably thing twice about hiring the person.

I think a lot of questions that are of the more generic- or incompetent-seeming-HR sort only exist to test for compliance and for bullshit tolerance. Plus for the kind of socialization that means you understand you're supposed to both pretend to take them seriously and use acceptable corporation-friendly answers to everything (even if they're lies).

Re: WTF with high school questions?

#49

Why do recruiters have such trouble with such a simple task like gauging a candidate's real skills? Seriously. Here is how to do it. I'm looking for a React Developer, I ask the following simple questions: 1. Tell my about your contributions to major projects you have been involved in. (if they share their work ask more in-depth questions about it) 2. With $givenTechnologyStack, how do you usually solve state managem…

[deleted]

Re: WTF with high school questions?

#50

This is dumb. If you don't want to apply, don't. If you think something is no one else's business, don't tell them. But don't cry when they discard your application because they think it IS relevant, because shockingly you don't personally have a monopoly on truth...

If a company were to ask about my star sign, then I know that their idea of what is relevant is not grounded in reality and will avoid employment with them.

Someone asking me about my strengths in high school, which was decades ago, then that tells me they are looking for young people. (And from the link at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30735678 you can see they don't care about my grad school experience, which was much more formative to my career path.)

In the US, age discrimination for employment for people 40 years or older is illegal. As the author of the linked-to essay correctly points out, these questions comes across like trying to discriminate on the basis of age without outright saying it.

Which trespasses on a special form of government monopoly that it can enforce.

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