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Comment by amazonavocado | Hacker News Reader

>startups try to be selective; but they're really desperate to hire

That is a paradox I am still trying to figure out LOL.

Ostensibly, startups are huge on culture fit. But also at the same time they want someone who knows a certain stack in and out, and can't attract those people all the time.

So startups and large companies are selective, in different ways?

And that is really gonna be a game changer for me, in turning my interview strategy into something that satisfies subjective needs.

I guess it's because so many candidates, as you say, can do the job because they perform well on an objective basis that larger companies have to reach into other less objective criteria to filter them out?

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The hiring criteria of a large company isn't as subjective as you think. It just comes down to, "can you act like an adult and get along when you don't get your way?"

This isn't subjective at all! It just means that a technical interview is more than getting a correct answer; it also means that a technical interview is demonstrating that you can behave in a mature environment. That's why part of my interview turns into "tell me what I want to hear."

Because startups are horribly mismanaged, you can get away with certain forms of immaturity as long as you produce results. Larger companies don't put up with that.

I'd like to be a fly on the wall on some "sample" in-person interviews to see what I have to do and how to do it.

Basically I ask some questions where the requirements are ambiguous, and the solution is non-standard. Other times I ask someone to write a simple task using an outdated API.

Why? Someone who can't figure out the ambiguous requirements will require a lot of handholding. I don't have time for that.

Someone who argues about the requirement to use an outdated API either doesn't get the point of the question, or will ask to refactor years of perfectly working code on the first day. The outdated outdated API goes through so many core concepts that it's an awesome interview question. Someone competent should move through it without any struggle!

Even worse is when I ask someone to write some manual SQL and they tell me that doing SQL by hand is outdated! Instant rejection! I want to know that you understand the underlying concept without relying on magic. Manual SQL is easy, if you're competent.

Or, I had someone tell me that passing values to a constructor in C# is outdated... Not when you're using immutables for thread safety!

That's what I mean by play along and tell the interviewer what they want to hear.

That sounds reasonable enough. My last experience was more of a total non-adjustment to the actual candidate.

E.g. asking such bullshit vague questions that might work on a recent graduate because you could assume that's a software engineering 101 question but if you actually asked them what exactly they meant, even just the scope or language, or offering 3 different paths of which one you'd like to sketch out tot hem .. blank stare, repeating the question.

You should also look at this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17850955

"I could use this as a way into a discussion, and see how people carry themselves in such a (vaguely work-like) situation."

Looks like that poster has a very similar interview approach to me.

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