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Comment by xelxebar | Hacker News Reader

This just gets me thinking.

Optimizing for originality seems the wrong criteria as an interviewee if you are genuinely trying to feel out the company and what working there might be like.

As an interviewer don't you think it's more telling to see how an interviewer responds to the answers you give? I mean, asking a prepared question is kind of low effort regardless, but using a question to initiate discussion, that shows real engagement.

Dunno. Just thinking out loud here.

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Fair criticism. Thinking about it more, on a very very general level, I guess that all of the questions in the article ring to me as the type: "What can this company do for me? Does it meet all the criteria of somewhere I want to work?"

The second type of question that I mentioned above is more of the type: "What can I bring to this role and how I can I contribute to this company?"

As an interviewer, if I don't get any of the second type of question it makes me question their passion and ownership a bit.

Why does "passion" always come up as a requirement? Isn't enough that the candidate is smart, competent, professional, and motivated? Do they really have to pretend that they have a deep and burning passion for CRUD apps and SQLite? Do they need to profess their love for the accounting web portal they're going to be tasked with maintaining? You're not looking for a spouse, you're looking for an employee.

This, 100%. My company is jumping on the 'engaged employee' bandwagon, and it's frankly pretty patronizing. No, I do not give a shit about your marketing app. However, I enjoy my coworkers and the interesting technical problems we're tasked with solving. Just embrace the fact that you're not Google and you can still hire good people.

100% agree. In any case, at least as far as my experience has been, the technical interview is usually one of the first steps and more often than not, I really don't have much of a clear idea about the product and the work itself.

The best way to make do in this case is to ask questions that will help me gauge if I would be happy here even if I'm working on a CRUD app.

It's the people that make it worthwhile after all :)

Originality? Individuality? Or creativity? If you have 100 applicants and 99 of them all ask the same questions but the last one asks slightly better questions, doesn't that give the edge to #100?

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