Comment by choot | Hacker News Reader

Comment by choot | Hacker News Reader

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One of my friend who was not so strong in programming was never short of any jobs that were available to him.

He told me he took a ukulele to the interview. Each time when interviewer asked him a question, he would play ukulele untill he found the answer.

He got the job even when his interviews went wrong.

His job offer arrived months after an interview because he was the only guy who the interviewer could remember.

Often you hire for a spot in a company, after sometime that person leaves and management asks you to name any other person and when you try to recall last interviewee batch, the ukulele guy is only one the interviewer is able to remember.

I've spent a fair amount of time interviewing in London a few years ago. I would literally go to any company that send me an e-mail or contacted me via recruiters.

I didn't have enough money to buy new clothes at the time, so instead I've picked the shoes with the largest amount of holes and would never do any grooming before hands. I would come stoned to the interview. So the gist: instead of trying to appear on the lower mid end, I went all the way through to the lowest low end.

Thinking retrospectively I think that's pretty much the reason why I barely received any negative responses unless I had miserably failed at the technical side of things (e.g. I didn't know how to use generators in Python at the time and the whole list of questions would be about them and their syntax).

I have to admit that in this scenario I was quite good at the technical side of things. But the general philosophy was that if I don't try to appear too good - people will assume that I was better. Put humility and definite sprinkle of character on top of that.

Your friend is a mad genius. That's so brilliantly absurd but aligns so well with my experience in interviews that I can't dispute it.

That's awesome, and there must be more stories you can tell about this guy. If so, do tell!

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