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Comment by nashashmi | Hacker News Reader

Anecdote: I once listed three references. All three had favorable opinions of me. But I didn't tell any of them and they were unprepared to answer the questions that followed in a reference call.

One of them was able to wing it well. Second one answered questions flatly and without enthusiasm. A third was more nervous not to hurt me than he was confident he could help me with his answers.

I thought the surprise effect would be telling to my interviewers that the answers were not artificial.

Looking back, in a world where all interviews are artificial, why was I trying so hard to be different?

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For most people, it takes conscious thought and effort to take an impression and articulate it. When you tell your references ahead of time, you're giving them a chance to take their impression/opinion/emotion of you and figure out how to put it into words ahead of time. There's nothing artificial about the outcome if you give them the time to do this. In fact it may seem more natural since they aren't nervous and on the spot!

Not to mention that by asking someone for a reference, you're asking them to do you a favor. So you should, y'know... actually ask them first.

> I thought the surprise effect would be telling to my interviewers that the answers were not artificial.

I tried this once for a job interview. I didn't prepare at all besides quickly scanning the company website.

It was a disaster. The position was for a PHP developer, and I accidentally mentioned that there is a lot of crappy PHP code in the world, in a way that made it sound like I didn't like PHP (I don't, but that's besides the point).

It didn't help that the interview was with an HR person. If it was with another developer, I would've been more than happy to elaborate on my opinion that there is a lot of poorly written PHP code, and that it is very easy to write poor quality PHP, but it is possible to write good (or acceptable) PHP.

That's the companies fault for interviewing you with a HR person. When I do the hiring for my teams I explicitly don't let non-technical people do more than the absolute most basic filtering (i.e this person can't spell for shit, this person doesn't have any experience etc).

In fact, I'd love to have some candidates come in and shit all over X language or Y library. It's a good sign as long as they stick to factual gripes and aren't just mindlessly ranting. People who don't care about doing the best possible job don't give a shit, they'll happily use whatever is popular on autopilot for years of their career.

All my interviewing has been for front-end so most of my interviewees are deeply entrenched in whatever the fad of the month cult is (Vue seems to be the June 2018 pick). I spend the second half of each interview begging them to give me some kind of discussion point, pros/cons of something, an opinion of their own, or literally anything other than the pseudo-marketing tripe on page 1 of their favourite library's documentation ("I love working with Typescript because it scales so well!" puke)

Sounds like your HR person didn't know what they were looking for ;)

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