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Comment by pinewurst | Hacker News Reader

Another data point - I had a very similar Google recruiter "test", being disdainfully dismissed because I couldn't/wouldn't regurgitate the same incorrect template answers they had. I've since terminated any approaches by Google recruiters as being a waste of my time and emotional energy.

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I'm in a similar boat - I've been approached twice in the past, and both times went on to the onsite interview day only to be told "We are unsure whether we want to hire you, so we will err on the side of caution and ask you to come back in a year".

However, I am still getting contacted randomly by their recruiters without any indication why I should invest energy to try again - the result will generally the same. Getting an answer to that question also turned out to be impossible, since I only got stock answers back. Really shameful for a company which (at least in my perception) prides itself on celebrating an engineer-driven culture (instead of one driven by HR).

According to their recruiters, I "need to learn Java and algorithms" to get an FTE phone screen.

I had this when I applied as a grad. I wasn’t clear what they were looking for so I asked if they were looking for algorithms and language agnostic programming ability, or whether they were looking for Java and Java standard library knowledge. They wanted the latter, just Java. I didn’t continue my application.

If I got that response I'd tell the recruiter that "I'm not an RCG programmer, I'm a systems engineer, and that stuff has no relation to the actual work I do." Than I'd ask them not to call me again.

I wonder whether there is some perverse pleasure from trying to make an honest hardworking technically accomplished person who contributes something good to the world feel like a loser.

I suspect you already know the answer... and it's pretty depressing.

Yes, they get their kicks by feeling superior to applicants.

This is similar to taking standardized tests where you are smarter than the question-writer.

What would you select as the answer to the following question:

" x is an integer. If x² = 16, then x =?

A. 1.

B. 2.

C. 4.

D. 16.

E. Not enough information.

Think hard and tell me what you would select. For me it is VERY clear that I have to select C, 4. It is just as clear that it is the wrong answer, and the correct answer is E, because x can be -4 or 4, and you do not have enough information. How do I know to select C? Mostly, from the context. "x is an integer" is a weird and stupid way to begin a question like that, the whole question is pretty stupid. The choices are just natural whole numbers, and ones that someone might select.

Still, the question has a VERY clear correct answer, which is E. It is not the answer you should select.

Likewise if you are being given a technical interview by someone reading stupid template questions, then you need to figure out how dumb the template is, and answer on that level. It's not about being correct.

The question "standardized test" I just made up and answered should be answered incorrectly. Don't answer questions like that correctly.

I don't get it. Integers include negative numbers, so -4 and 4 are both integers.

Why would you select C? Because you're assuming the recruiter doesn't know what an integer is, based on the fact that all the answer choices are positive integers?

Correct.

I think the point was to deliberately choose an example that would be understood by most the readership but sufficiently technical that it might be seen as an ambiguous question to someone less technical.

Reminds me a bit of those facebook clickbait posts "This question is so hard that only 5% of people will get it right"

I actually mean it as a real example. If given this stupid question I would actually, in real life, choose 4 (while knowing it is the incorrect answer.) This is due to the exact phrasing and the other choices given.

I think we'd all agree the correct answer is E, but I had multiple math teachers regrade my tests with higher scores after I pointed out that there were multiple correct solutions to the problem. In several cases, other students had provided the same solution I had but assumed they were wrong because the graded test said so. And these were tests the teachers had used for years. So let's change the question: if you're a student taking this test, how do you make sure that you didn't lose points because the test writers thought that C was the right solution? Or do you just trust public educators to grade you correctly?

In my country of origin, multiple choice tests weren't really a thing in school so it never really came up.

I guess the US has multiple choice tests at all levels.

Well the incident that sticks out in my memory was actually the kind where you show your work and circle your final answer. And as long as you get that work back and are confident you can then re-check the problem and can appeal with the teacher. That's a little harder to do with multiple choice because you have to replicate how you arrived at the answer you did, but the bigger problem is a general process problem. Standardized tests often don't yield individual results to the test-taker, so you're entirely dependent on the test writers and whatever review they seek out to ensure it's correct. And standardized test writers have been known to have some pretty BS questions (there was an article around where an actual author whose writing was used as material in a standardized test didn't know the answer to the questions being asked of students).

I think this is the one

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/standardized-tests-are-...

Having tutored my 13-year-old daughter through algebra this school year, a common mistake is flipping this into a square-root problem.

As asked, the question is about mappings ℝ+ → ℝ ⨯ ℝ ∪ {0}. Square root is different, mapping ℝ+ → ℝ+ ∪ {0}. The question could have been sloppily worded or someone trying to make it look more “mathy.”

When I tell my daughter that negative numbers have square roots too and are imaginary, she rolls her eyes and sighs.

IRL the misinformed question author wouldn't include an "E" as a possible answer and that's your cue to select C.

There are different clues in different contexts. The hardest is if there is a very technical definition that makes another answer more correct.

Maybe in a test of English:

"John has less _____ than Mary. So they decided to go to Mary's apartment for breakfast."

A. Bread

B. Window

C. Eggs

D. Times

This is an incredibly stupid question oh my God. What would I even pick.

All of the choices, and the whole question, is so stupid.

But anyway obviously they want you to pick "eggs" because you are supposed to know it is good for breakfast. You can tell how low the bar is by its inclusion of window, as though you might not know this simple word.

It is ungrammatical to say "less window than", "less times than" and "less eggs than" (you're supposed to say fewer eggs than.)

Only "bread" is grammatical in that sentence and it makes just as much sense as all the other stupid choices, but I would pick the ungrammatical choice C (it's a hard one though, the resulting sentence is stupid) versus the grammatically correct choice A.

This is just a technical distinction though.

Less window is informal but I don’t see how it’s incorrect. Bread is both correct and fits the context better.

Yes but from "times" you can see that this is a test of VERY basic English. I agree with you that Bread is both correct and fits the context better, and I would still choose "eggs" (a worse answer, from the choices given) because I would analyze what the (really stupid) question-writer wanted.

You are right that window exists in that sense but in this case it's clear that the question writers didn't think about it.

For "window" in particular, we rarely say it the way you imply, the whole Internet has just 4 instances of these words after each other:

https://www.google.com/search?q=%22had+less+window+than%22

(you can try 'have' and 'has' for 'had'). But you might be right that the informal sense of "window" that I think you imply (window of time) might be technically the best answer in a different context but absolutely not the answer to pick!

So it actually is a good example of a potentially better answer that you shouldn't pick after analyzing the question!

No, I meant less physical window, although I see what you are getting at with the other sense.

“Less eggs” isn’t actually correct. Eggs are countable, so it would be “fewer eggs”.

You can have “less bread”, or “fewer loaves of bread”.

This is getting very pedantic though.

This is specifically what actually makes it, eggs, objectively wrong -- though it is the choice that will be marked correct and which you, the test-taker should pick, even if you realize it is wrong. Pedantically, it is wrong to say "less eggs" while it is correct to say "less bread" but due to the level of pedantry, you, the test-taker, should prefer to pick the incorrect answer (eggs) over the only actually grammatical answer (bread) - even though this is a test of English.

You have to set aside what is correct and incorrect and decide how educated the test-writer was, and what they might want you to pick, or what they are attempting to test.

This has direct relevance to the article are discussing.

Bread could be slang for Cash which fits grammatically and would also be a reason to go to Mary's apartment for breakfast instead of Denny's.

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