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Comment by aluminussoma | Hacker News Reader

This situation slightly reminds me of the interview process at some tech companies. Over the past year, I have interviewed on-site at 10 different companies. Two of those companies had one interview where the questions were extremely difficult and uncommon. When I told my friends those questions, many also thought the questions were bad interview questions.

It is important in any selection mechanism, like interviews, that we have a fair and consistent method of selecting applicants. Yet the questions need to be varied enough so that candidates cannot cheat by hearing the questions ahead of time.

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This situation slightly reminds me of the interview process at some tech companies.

This is exactly the same as the whiteboarding algorithms questions. They all have a simple answer which is obvious if you have been recently cramming for your CS finals. But you are unlikely to remember them in sufficient detail if you are over a certain age, because no real actual working programmer needs to know that stuff by heart, it's either been abstracted into libraries or you just reach for a book when you need one. A perfectly plausible way to do ageism, right under the noses of any regulators.

I actually would not agree. There is a common set of knowledge that one is expected to know, even if it isn't actively used daily. During the interview process, it was clear that many of the companies asked similar questions. It was possible to prepare for.

However, the two companies I referenced asked questions that were close to impossible to prepare for. These were also not whiteboarding questions (both did have separate whiteboarding sessions which were fair)

What were the impossible questions? (You're not really expected to keep them secret, so it's fine to list them.)

To your point, it's strange that there's a common set of knowledge we're expected to know which we don't use, ever. Not just "in 99% of cases," but literally ever: If it ever comes up in the field, you can look up what you need to know in a few minutes.

Few would think that's a sensible way to hire someone, so I've spent a long time wondering why this is the case. I think it's because the hiring process implicitly selects for whoever makes it through. Meaning, if someone is giving you a test, they're biased into thinking it's a good test: After all, they passed it. That's why they're in a position to give it to you.

So it almost doesn't matter whether it's a good test or a bad test. Just that it's a test that the interviewer happens to like. There's enough talent floating around that people are willing to do whatever strange rituals you demand they do, regardless of whether it's efficient for them to know that knowledge. Since it's ambiguous whether the knowledge actually helps anyone, you get the present situation.

This totally does happen. The way it works is straightforward: the default set of interview questions is almost untenably hard, but sponsored candidates get abbreviated interviews. Especially in small-to-midsize companies, a significant chunk of hiring is network hiring, so this works for awhile.

I did get and take an offer at a solid tech company. On Glassdoor, there were some impossible questions listed. I was referred to that company and I didn't get asked an impossible question. I attributed that to being lucky, but perhaps I lucked out in getting an abbreviated interview.

Heh. I give interviews at a solid tech company. It's a moderate amount of work to come up with good interview questions, and I don't like changing them very often because having identical questions makes it easier to compare candidates and get a real feel for how they rank in relation to the rest of the population.

Imagine my dismay when I saw my carefully crafted problems posted on Glass Door. So, I made dozens of Glass Door accounts and posted the hardest, most bizarre, and occasionally literally impossible to answer questions on my company's Glass Door page to drown out the real questions posted there in a sea of insanity. Hope you liked it!

From a candidate's point of view, that might not have been a good idea. I try to keep in mind that glassdoor is easily astroturfed, and that competitors have an interest in posting negative content to someone's glassdoor. But some of the content still influences me. Especially the interview questions, since it's hard to make those up.

A candidate has to decide how to spend their time and which companies to pursue, so filtering out companies that have clearly-crazy interview procedures is a decent way to optimize.

> Especially the interview questions, since it's hard to make those up.

Nonsense. Have you ever even tried? ;)

Seriously, though, I see your point, but I'm still pretty satisfied with what I've done. If candidates who read interview questions are self-filtering out of our interview process, I count that as a win. Better to miss out on a good candidate than hire a bad a bad one.

Something like this might just disqualify you from most good candidates.

the modern tech version of this is 'culture fit' but it starts even before you get an interview, identical resumes with anglo vs. foreign last names have been studied with unfortunately predictable results.

We're hard-wired to be tribal and much more comfortable around our own kind, very difficult problem.

That presents an interesting problem for job seekers to solve. Can't do gov. Regulations effectively. I'd imagine a more thorough version of glassdoor would help job seekers identify when they are being gicen harder than normal questions, but that would require diligent community participation

You just look at hiring trends.

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