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I started with a SQL question. He said "that's a dumb question."

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Re: I started with a SQL question. He said "that's a dumb question."

#41

Post by Simon_O_Rourke »

crazydoggers wrote: post #16

If I were on the board / an investor of the company, I’d let the managers go and hire back that engineer. The goal of a company is to serve its customers and make a profit, not stroke managements egos. And it sounds more like this guy pointed out what was wrong and maybe embarrassed people, but that doesn’t make him an asshole. It’s one thing to be mean or call people names, that’s an asshole. But this guy was an “as…

Yes but once the guy is sacked for cause, or trumped up poor performance, bad attitude etc. the remaining narrative is crafted by the layer of management that remains.

Re: I started with a SQL question. He said "that's a dumb question."

#42

Post by gundmc »

nkrisc wrote: post #37
bgwalter wrote: post #12

Calling someone a "disagreeable asshole" just for saying that something is a dumb question is a bit strong. So he went out for challenging management on an internal document and he was 100% correct according to that tweet. Seems to me that the actual assholes are still employed in that company. Perhaps he was just hired to fix the mess. Once the job was done, he was no longer needed.

You can be a disagreeable asshole even while being completely correct. Being an “asshole” relates to inter-personal relationships, it has nothing to do with facts or correctness.

In the immortal words of The Dude: "You're not wrong, Walter, you're just an asshole."

Re: I started with a SQL question. He said "that's a dumb question."

#43

Post by sandinmyjoints »

cluckindan wrote: post #24
sandinmyjoints wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What interview format are you using that a candidate could be using an LLM during it?

There is software that sends video call transcripts to LLMs and shows you answers in real-time.

I was not aware of this. (We haven’t been interviewing recently.) Honest question, is it not possible to see the candidate’s eyes scanning the text? In video meetings I notice this when someone is reading.

Re: I started with a SQL question. He said "that's a dumb question."

#44

Post by mingus88 »

ajmurmann wrote: post #32
Freedom2 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Last time I said "you shouldn't do X" in an in person interview, I failed and the feedback was "candidate was not cooperative with the interviewer". So even if the candidate is not using an LLM, the interview process is so messed up now that people willingly go along otherwise they may be rejected for, you know, actually stating what their experience was like. Funnily enough, that was a YC funded company that I was i…

That's very disappointing. As an interviewer the ideal situation I want in an interview is one where we are discussing tradeoffs. It allows the interviewee to show a deep understanding of the solutions we are discussing and, depending on the problem, even share insights around business impact. I wonder if the pushback is more of a common reaction from more junior interviewers or once that aren't very empowered and ju…

Yeah it sounds like maybe OP was too direct. “Uncooperative” is strong language for feedback

I had a systems scenario recently where I was expected to troubleshoot a MySQL master that was trying to backup via rsync to a hung NFS mount.

I successfully resolved the problem and only then detailed how messed up their design was to get into such a situation in 2025.

Re: I started with a SQL question. He said "that's a dumb question."

#45

Post by remram »

Freedom2 wrote: post #29
remram wrote: post #20

Asking dumb questions has become one of my moves in interviews. This is to expose LLM users, as LLMs are extremely unlikely to answer a "how do I do X" question with "you shouldn't do X", or "how would you replace Y" with "you should keep using Y". I guess now I have an additional reason to ask, so that I can screen out the assholes that will say it's a dumb question...

Last time I said "you shouldn't do X" in an in person interview, I failed and the feedback was "candidate was not cooperative with the interviewer". So even if the candidate is not using an LLM, the interview process is so messed up now that people willingly go along otherwise they may be rejected for, you know, actually stating what their experience was like. Funnily enough, that was a YC funded company that I was i…

Sounds like you learned something valuable about them and dodged a bullet!

I won't disagree about it being messed up though.

Re: I started with a SQL question. He said "that's a dumb question."

#46

Post by disambiguation »

recursivedoubts wrote: post #27
bgwalter wrote: post #12

Calling someone a "disagreeable asshole" just for saying that something is a dumb question is a bit strong. So he went out for challenging management on an internal document and he was 100% correct according to that tweet. Seems to me that the actual assholes are still employed in that company. Perhaps he was just hired to fix the mess. Once the job was done, he was no longer needed.

found the disagreeable asshole (I'm a disagreeable asshole)

I knew it, I'm surrounded by disagreeable assholes!

Re: I started with a SQL question. He said "that's a dumb question."

#47

Post by roryirvine »

remram wrote: post #20

Asking dumb questions has become one of my moves in interviews. This is to expose LLM users, as LLMs are extremely unlikely to answer a "how do I do X" question with "you shouldn't do X", or "how would you replace Y" with "you should keep using Y". I guess now I have an additional reason to ask, so that I can screen out the assholes that will say it's a dumb question...

This sort of question works well for assessing senior / lead skills.

For example, when asked how to go about replacing PostgreSQL with MongoDB, it'd be okay for someone fairly junior to either give a straightforward answer or to turn their nose up and say "eww, no" - but you'd expect someone with more seniority to instead flag that it was an unusual scenario and ask for more detail.

Prepare a vaguely-plausible reason (eg. "we're storing JSON documents and the team are more comfortable with Mongo's tooling"), and this can form the basis for a productive discussion which you can drive in whichever social or technical direction you feel is most appropriate.

Re: I started with a SQL question. He said "that's a dumb question."

#48

Post by wenc »

The SQL question (mentioned in the thread) was:

  "It was very benign and was probably the most practical question I asked him! Let's say you want to randomly sample 1,000 users out of a table with a user_id column, e.g. so you can get a list of IDs to send a customer feedback form to. How would you do that?"
To me, that's not a dumb question. I mean, there is a simple answer but there are also complicated answers (especially if your table size is large, and performance matters):

1. SELECT user_id FROM table LIMIT 1000 -- this gives unordered results, but is not truly random (it's dependent on database retrieval patterns)

2. SELECT user_id FROM table ORDER BY RANDOM() LIMIT 1000 -- this is uniform random, but it's expensive for big tables.

3. SELECT user_id USING SAMPLE reservoir(1000 ROWS) -- this is a fast and memory-efficient streaming method, i.e. Reservoir Sampling [1] in which n is treated as large and unknown (DuckDB supports this sampling method and others: https://duckdb.org/docs/stable/sql/samples.html) Reservoir sampling (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reservoir_sampling) was a hot topic among data scientists on Quora circa 2011.

Sometimes simple questions have deep implications.

Re: I started with a SQL question. He said "that's a dumb question."

#49

Post by almostdeadguy »

ajmurmann wrote: post #36
almostdeadguy wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being kind and knowing how to deliver disagreement in a constructive way is important. Human beings aren’t perfect logical subjects immune from emotion (thankfully). Hopefully a good manager can take steps to address this or help mediate conversations where such a person might struggle. But places where “playing the game” (like withholding valid concerns with a decision) is a criteria for success are not long for thi…

One danger I see with brilliant jerks is that they can also lead to others not sharing their legitimate concerns. If someone who is usually right calls you stupid frequently when you speak up or just make a suggestion you'll eventually stop making suggestions. Psychological safety is core to teams self-correcting. Of course you could also only hire people with very aggressive communication styles. I've seen this work…

I don’t disagree with this at all, psychological safety is important and abusive jerks don’t belong on any team. It’s also important to try to understand if someone is being intentionally rude and callous or simply being blunt/potentially being misunderstood.

Re: I started with a SQL question. He said "that's a dumb question."

#50

Post by sdedovic »

sandinmyjoints wrote: post #43
cluckindan wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is software that sends video call transcripts to LLMs and shows you answers in real-time.

I was not aware of this. (We haven’t been interviewing recently.) Honest question, is it not possible to see the candidate’s eyes scanning the text? In video meetings I notice this when someone is reading.

Fun fact, there are multiple pieces of software that will real-time correct your eye tracking. Useful for virtual all hands or talks to fix teleprompter eyes.
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