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I had to give a wrong answer to get the job (2017)

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Re: I had to give a wrong answer to get the job (2017)

#91

Post by Turing_Machine »

Radim wrote: post #9

Heh. Happens all the time with tests and questionnaires, the choice is always frustrating: * "Does the author really mean what they are asking? Are the mistakes in the phrasing or corner cases intentional, meant to catch me, test my deep knowledge?" , or * "Is the author just not very good with logic / not thinking this through?" I go with the latter in "soft social" contexts. Never regretted it yet. This saved my hi…

I recall taking "ethics training" at a former job where a typical quiz question was something like this:

A vendor offers you season tickets to the Cubs games. Are you allowed to accept?

1) Yes, because neither of you are in the baseball business.

2) No, not under any circumstances.

3) Yes, if you give the tickets to someone else, such as your brother-in-law.

The "right answer" was quite obvious, making it more of an intelligence test than an ethics test.

Re: I had to give a wrong answer to get the job (2017)

#92

Post by useerup »

kevinmgranger wrote: post #12

Model View Controller doesn't really mean anything in 2021. It might have meant something when the term was first coined, but everyone has such different ideas on what it means it's not a useful term anymore.

It meant something before Rails bastardized it.

Until then (and thanks to Smalltalk) it was a composite UI design pattern combining observable and mediator patterns. It was also a recursive pattern, in which the "editor" could itself be a model-view-controller.

Rails designers completely misunderstood it (or deliberately ignored it) and simply reused the terms for something that was only marginally similar, not recursive and was not inherently "active".

Other frameworks adopted Rails' terminology and now we are left with the original pattern having been completely forgotten.

Re: I had to give a wrong answer to get the job (2017)

#94

Post by KETpXDDzR »

> If he didn’t know, I would totally humiliate him in front of his boss.

I only know this from Indian culture. There, someone can "loose their face" if you correct them in front of others.

A friend if mine attended a conference talk of a colleague. She noticed that they made fundamental mistakes in their statistical analysis when she asked if they performed some prior tests. The result was her manager telling her that she shouldn't ask questions in public anymore.

Re: I had to give a wrong answer to get the job (2017)

#95

Post by [deleted] »

zabzonk wrote: post #72
bitwize wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your experience is not universal. I've been passed over for a job because I did not recite the right buzzwords (framework names, etc.). Your job in an interview is to please the person across the table from you. Some interviewers are looking for a sharp technical mind unafraid to challenge them. Others view any challenge to what they think is right as a threat.

> Some interviewers are looking for a sharp technical mind unafraid to challenge them. And people like that are those you want to work with. > Others view any challenge to what they think is right as a threat. And those you don't.

[deleted]

Re: I had to give a wrong answer to get the job (2017)

#96

Post by dharmab »

dennis_moore wrote: post #20
laurieg wrote: post #8

> So I decided to start by giving the correct answer, and see how he responded. I explained “The model-view-controller is a software pattern, and so resides inside the written code. Since in most cases, this code only runs on the application tier, …”. But then I saw him frowning, and so knew this was not the answer the was expecting. So I continued: This is a great cold reading technique that works in magic tricks to…

All great until you come across someone with a permanent poker face. During my last interview, the interviewer was frowning the whole time.

As someone with a default poker face I am so sorry, I swear I smile, just on the inside mostly.

Re: I had to give a wrong answer to get the job (2017)

#97

Post by PUSH_AX »

I'd rather give the correct answer, if they are going to fight the answer despite being wrong then it's a good sign I don't want to work with these people. Interviews being a two way process and all, this seems like it was an excellent opportunity to test their character.

Re: I had to give a wrong answer to get the job (2017)

#98

Post by fogof »

One thing this reminds me of is the use of "Compute the nth Fibonacci number" as an interview question. The interviewer may expect you to show off your knowledge of dynamic programming by memoizing the function. But you take a risk if you implement the matrix exponentiation algorithm [1], which is actually optimal in that it only uses O(log(n)) arithmetic operations. I had an interviewer once who seemed a bit skeptical when I mentioned there was a sublinear algorithm for Fibonacci.

[1] : https://math.stackexchange.com/a/867404/165144

Re: I had to give a wrong answer to get the job (2017)

#99

Post by kevstev »

unbalancedevh wrote: post #19
tomerv wrote: post #15

Can't really comment on whether that was the correct way to handle the situation, given that passing the interview was the goal. However, I would have a hard time giving an incorrect answer on purpose. I also consider an interview as an opportunity to learn about the company I'm going to work for, and especially my future colleagues. I would probably try to give a full answer, such as "there's a widely-held concept X…

And giving a response like this is still a good indication of people skills -- Do you know how to present a controversial opinion in a way that encourages people to accept it, or do you ram it down people's throats?

Yeah I think this is way overblown- The way to approach this is "Well typically MVC is presented as such and people think its represented in typical architectures as blah blah blah, but from an actual theory perspective what actually happens is that blah blah blah..."

You cover both bases, give the blogspam answer that most view is the "right" one, but also show that you have a much deeper understanding.

My favorite question when interviewing node.js candidates was around this type of ambiguity- "Is node.js single threaded or multithreaded?" and most would immediately shout back "single threaded!" but the reality is that its a bit more complicated than that, its a single threaded event loop backed by a thread pool, and I wouldn't ever hold a "single threaded!" answer against them, but start to ask leading questions as to what happens when we have say 5 requests all come in more or less at the same time to see if they really understood how things work. And the point is not to gotcha! them, its just to start a discussion- though if they reply back "well its complicated..." then I know they probably are already there.

In the context of MVC though, I feel this is really overly pedantic. MVC is an idea that is never actually implemented in purity, and understanding the basic idea is all that is really needed, outside of maybe very specific roles implementing web frameworks.

Re: I had to give a wrong answer to get the job (2017)

#100

Post by LinuxBender »

PUSH_AX wrote: post #97

I'd rather give the correct answer, if they are going to fight the answer despite being wrong then it's a good sign I don't want to work with these people. Interviews being a two way process and all, this seems like it was an excellent opportunity to test their character.

I agree with your logic. Anecdotally I had an experience that proves your point. The ASVAB [1] test had about a dozen incorrect questions. I brought this to their attention and was told to pick the least wrong answer. This was exactly the mind-set I dealt with my entire time in the military. Incorrect questions meaning that either all the answers were correct or incorrect based on the question

[1] - https://www.todaysmilitary.com/joining-eligibility/asvab-tes...

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