The Most Revealing Job Interview Question • Hacker News Board

Re: The Most Revealing Job Interview Question

#191

Post by vacri » Fri, Oct 05, 2012, 12:56 AM UTC

sadga wrote: post #67

drivingmenuts wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> hobbies are controversial, or simply derided I think that answers your question. Look, you're asking someone to walk into an interview, with people they do not know, and lay out a portion of their personal life for examination, without any idea of how that information may be used against them. That's pretty unfairly tilted in favor of the company. I, for one, do not discuss my private life in depth in interviews -…

> That's pretty unfairly tilted in favor of the company. You seem to be assuming that the company's goal is to find a reason to reject someone. That's not correct. If anything, it's tilted in favor of candidates that have the same hobbies as interviewers.

A large part of interviewing is gut feeling about someone. If you think their personal life has a number of trite aspects, it's not going to do wonders for their chances.

Re: The Most Revealing Job Interview Question

#192

Post by vacri » Fri, Oct 05, 2012, 1:15 AM UTC

ctdonath wrote: post #41

jamesbritt wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You probably would not get hired. Probably not. But what does that say about this particular technique? There's the ability to explain something, and there's the ability to perform under sudden pressure. I would give candidates some period of time (say, 10 minutes, if they needed that long) to select a topic first.

You've scheduled a half-hour with a candidate (or explain why longer), and you're going to sit in silence for 10 minutes just so s/he can pick a starting point for a 5 minute monolog on any topic? Given the option to talk about anything , I'd be concerned if the candidate couldn't pick something in 10 seconds . Summary of last book read, semantic difference between method calls in C++ vs Objective-C, sewing, recreati…

It's not "pick a topic to discuss", it's "pick a topic that you can spend five minutes doing a complete lesson on", sprung as a surprise question.

Re: The Most Revealing Job Interview Question

#193

Post by vacri » Fri, Oct 05, 2012, 1:17 AM UTC

king_magic wrote: post #31

jamesbritt wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You probably would not get hired. Probably not. But what does that say about this particular technique? There's the ability to explain something, and there's the ability to perform under sudden pressure. I would give candidates some period of time (say, 10 minutes, if they needed that long) to select a topic first.

Well, at the same time, I wouldn't be able to do my job if I didn't have the ability to perform under sudden pressure.

There are different kinds of pressure. I went to lunch with a coworker who was very good at dealing with the pressure of running the shipping pipeline. Someone started having a seizure in front of us. I stepped in and dealt with it (ex-neuro) while she was paralysed and unable to do anything but watch in horror.

Re: The Most Revealing Job Interview Question

#194

Post by TWAndrews » Fri, Oct 05, 2012, 1:26 AM UTC

jazzychad wrote: post #115

engtech wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"In an interview, the interviewer literally has all the power, and saying "no" or refusing to answer a question posed by the interviewer seems rather difficult." If you feel like the interviewer has all the power in an interview, then it'll be difficult to negotiate your salary. You'll do things like give a concrete number when they ask you what your salary was at your last job. The only time I would feel like an int…

Doing an interview (specifically a tech interview in this situation) and negotiating salaries after you have an offer are two completely different things. I would fall for the trap, but I can (and have) negotiate a really great deal for myself in the offer phase.

The whole interview process is an implicit negotiation over salary.

Re: The Most Revealing Job Interview Question

#195

Post by TWAndrews » Fri, Oct 05, 2012, 1:33 AM UTC

flatline3 wrote: post #168

njharman wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It feels like a trap. Reality is filled with traps. > steer the candidate off on a tangent Customers, coworkers, managers, do this intentionally or not, maliciously or not. Any good candidate can do the technical job. Great candidates can survive and thrive in the work place.

> Customers, coworkers, managers, do this intentionally or not, maliciously or not. None of these situations are the same as an interview. If you're providing an explanation at the behest of the interviewer, why not also depart on a tangent, also at the behest of the interviewer?

If you're explaining the value of your software to a prospect, why not also go off on a tangent at the behest of the prospect.

The role whose function an interview most resembles is that of a sales person. Having been in hundreds of sales meetings, I can say with total conviction that the ability to direct the conversation and deflect tangential questions is absolutely critical to being successful.

That said, every role doesn't require that skill, but OP specifically said that it's only for more senior/customer-facing positions.

Re: The Most Revealing Job Interview Question

#196

Post by teraflop » Fri, Oct 05, 2012, 1:38 AM UTC

mratzloff wrote: post #181

Jd wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have mixed feelings about this. I had an interview at Palantir with a self-described "front-end" guy, who asked me to write an algorithm to find a number between zero and infinity, where you could pick a number and you would get a response that would tell you whether or not the number was lower or higher than the secret number. The dude had a particular form of approaching the problem that was not at all the fastes…

It's a binary search in infinite space. His solution expands the problem area until the number is in the space and then shrinks the problem area until it finds the number. A better solution is to pick an arbitrarily large number and only expand if you have to--otherwise you're shrinking from the very beginning. That's how I would have answered the question, anyway. But yes, I've dealt with interviewers like this--typ…

I disagree that that solution is unequivocally better. It depends on the distribution of the input data; if the expected value of the number is small, then you're better off starting at zero than dramatically overestimating.

Of course, either way the algorithm runs in O(log n) time.

Re: The Most Revealing Job Interview Question

#197

Post by Jd » Fri, Oct 05, 2012, 1:46 AM UTC

teraflop wrote: post #196

mratzloff wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a binary search in infinite space. His solution expands the problem area until the number is in the space and then shrinks the problem area until it finds the number. A better solution is to pick an arbitrarily large number and only expand if you have to--otherwise you're shrinking from the very beginning. That's how I would have answered the question, anyway. But yes, I've dealt with interviewers like this--typ…

I disagree that that solution is unequivocally better. It depends on the distribution of the input data; if the expected value of the number is small, then you're better off starting at zero than dramatically overestimating. Of course, either way the algorithm runs in O(log n ) time.

Within the context of the interview question, the solution is specifically stated to be between 0 and infinity, and you can't surmise that the number is necessarily closer to 0. This is the error that my interviewer made. He was trained to deal with things within the context of situations closer to real life rather than the theoretical box he had established for the interviewing situation.

As for my case, I did attempt to start at an arbitrarily large number (but he wouldn't let me), and then went up exponentially (i.e. x = x * x), bi-secting the space once the upper-bound was found and solving from there.

My interviewer was sadly not that bright and didn't understand my solution, forcing me to re-write it -- incidentally, lecturing me on how wonderful O(log n) is along the way.

Re: The Most Revealing Job Interview Question

#198

Post by dror » Fri, Oct 05, 2012, 1:57 AM UTC

While interesting and thoughtful, I dislike trick interview questions where you tell the interviewer one thing, but look for another. The first problem is that someone who knows what you're doing, had read this article, for instance, has a huge advantage. The other problem is that it during an interview, I try to get people to relax so that I can get a sense of what they're really like. When they're on their guard of trick questions, it creates the opposite environment.

Re: The Most Revealing Job Interview Question

#199

Post by teraflop » Fri, Oct 05, 2012, 2:18 AM UTC

Jd wrote: post #197

teraflop wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree that that solution is unequivocally better. It depends on the distribution of the input data; if the expected value of the number is small, then you're better off starting at zero than dramatically overestimating. Of course, either way the algorithm runs in O(log n ) time.

Within the context of the interview question, the solution is specifically stated to be between 0 and infinity, and you can't surmise that the number is necessarily closer to 0. This is the error that my interviewer made. He was trained to deal with things within the context of situations closer to real life rather than the theoretical box he had established for the interviewing situation. As for my case, I did attem…

> the solution is specifically stated to be between 0 and infinity, and you can't surmise that the number is necessarily closer to 0.

Closer to 0 than what? Infinity? By any reasonable definition, every integer is closer to 0 than infinity.

I think the problem as stated is underspecified; I disagree that increasing "exponentially" (the solution your interviewer described would increase exponentially; your version is doubly exponential, I think) is always faster. Both versions have the same worst-case running time, and if you want to talk about expected running time you need to make assumptions about the data distribution. As a counterexample, if you start with an initial guess of 2 and keep squaring, but the true number is 2^1025, then you end up doing much more work than if you had doubled instead of squaring.

I can certainly agree with you that lecturing in an interview is unproductive. Not only is it understandably off-putting, but it doesn't give the interviewer any additional input to the hiring decision and therefore is a waste of everyone's time. (Unless one of the job requirements is coping well with being lectured to, I guess.)

Re: The Most Revealing Job Interview Question

#200

Post by jeremyjh » Fri, Oct 05, 2012, 2:34 AM UTC

powertower wrote: post #155

tokenadult wrote: post #9

The submitted site seems to be having trouble keeping up with the referrals from Hacker News, judging by its response time. (And that is amusing for a site called "refer.ly" that is all about user referrals. The site still needs upgrading to work at scale.) The question is "I want you to explain something to me. Pick any topic you want: a hobby you have, a book you’ve read, a project you worked on–anything. You’ll ha…

> a general intelligence test used in hiring that could have a "disparate impact" on applicants of some protected classes must "bear a demonstrable relationship to successful performance of the jobs for which it was used." This part has been revised in practical use all over the country in the last 10 years. If a test shows group-X scoring on average lower than group-Y, this in itself now proves that the test is bias…

If you are a small company no one is ever going to get a statistically valid sample size that could demonstrate any bias. They can only discover that data if it were available. If they do a work-performance test on a computer and the results are not kept, and racial/demographic data is not kept about each of the applications and their performance, how can this ever come up? These sorts of concerns really apply mostly to government jobs and large corporations.