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Comment by hvidgaard | Hacker News Reader

At that stage we're past a verbal phone screening, 1. interview, and they've been selected for the last round of interviews and they know before hand what the nature of the interview will be, including the "deep end of the pool" question. It is far and away the best way I've found to see how well they can adapt to new things, which is important to us.

But of course, you assume it's not relevant, and that I'm asking them to do the impossible.

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In the UK (IIRC IANAL, etc) the interview must be about assessing a candidate's suitability for a job and unsuitability for performing the work is the only justifiable reason for not offering someone a job, as opposed to, e.g. gender, disability, age, attractiveness, etc.

So I'm wondering how you'd justify not taking someone on by assessing them on a task that:

1) you know they can't do and, 2) if you've already vetted their CV, presumably those skills aren't required for the performance of the job in the first place.

It seems irrelevant whether they know you'll ask this kind of question, since they can't prepare for it, and flagging up something that is potentially unreasonable doesn't make it acceptable.

So, how do you objectively assess that person X did something that wasn't required for the job better than person Y, and justify to person Y why that matters?

My developers frequently need to jump into a completely unknown stack. And even if they didn't, I still expect the senior developers to reason and make decisions about things out of their comfort zone. I'm not asking them to rewrite WordPress in Elixir, or implement vEB trees in C - I'm giving them simple tasks where they are given a codebase to work with, and the task assumes zero knowledge about it, and they have time to prepare.

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