Hacker News Reader

Comment by logfromblammo | Hacker News Reader

I call this "Trebek Syndrome", after the long-time host of the "Jeopardy!" game show, Alex Trebek.

Sometimes, all the contestants will miss a prompt, and Alex Trebek comes across as a bit smug or incredulous when reading out the correct response. ("No one? No one knew this? The correct response is....") I may have occasionally yelled at my television, "You have been the host for decades! They have to give you all the answers in order to run the show!"

And that's what it is when you think you're smart just because you know most of the answers on "Jeopardy!" The game is different when you're watching it (or hosting it) than when you're actually playing it competitively.

The interview processes that are designed to stress or fluster a candidate can make the divide between host and players even worse. There is nothing the candidate can do to get the interviewer fired. Almost anything the interviewer does can result in a no-offer.

View on HN

The biggest lie you're told as a candidate and in any "mock interview" video a big tech company puts out is that the interview is collaborative. "They aren't your interviewer, they're your co-worker!" Go watch Google's example technical interview:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wwIysnVmAUg

Then go interview with them. They don't stand next and engage you while you're working at the white board. Instead, they sit at the opposite end of the table and type out your code line by line on their laptops so at the end they can see if whatever you scribbled actually compiles.

The laptop requirement just encourages disengagement. I knew the problem and how to get to the optimal solution for my first round at Google so it didn't affect my performance, but I was pretty disappointed because my interviewer, between typing up the lines I wrote on the board, was completely occupied answering email and Slack messages and barely said anything or made eye contact aside from the occasional "mhm" or nod. Had I gotten stuck at any point I don't think I would have been able to get any help, certainly not any help like I would get from a coworker in a truly collaborative scenario.

I cannot for the life of me figure out how people smart enough to work at a FAANG company would subject themselves to this kind of psychological dog and pony show. If I started a coding exercise in an interview, and the interviewer was sitting far away looking at a laptop screen and typing, I would literally just walk out of the building unprompted and go home. How are people able to twist their own self worth enough to actually feel _validated_ by that process? This seems like ritualistic fraternity hazing brought to bear on the professional workplace, with the stakes ratcheted up to 100.

>I cannot for the life of me figure out how people smart enough to work at a FAANG company would subject themselves to this kind of psychological dog and pony show.

$300k+ total comps are a big part of it

> If I started a coding exercise in an interview, and the interviewer was sitting far away looking at a laptop screen and typing

I would take a deep breath and go at it, thankful that this unfriendly person isn't breathing down my neck while I'm solving the problem.

Although that hardly constitutes a test of how someone will work in a collaborative environment.

To be fair, quite a lot of real-world "collaboration" consists of one person doing most of the work, and then sharing the credit (whether willing or not) with someone else. I am very accustomed to telling someone the hows and whys and not seeing any acknowledgement signals coming back.

Real collaborations have a lot of tangents, and rabbit trails, and clarification requests, and elucidation sidebars, and restating what has already been established, and re-asking the core questions to see if they have been answered. If the other person is just nodding and saying "Mmhmm. Go on.", then that's no "true [Scotsman]" collaborator. It's a typical collaboration, though; there are two people in the room, and between the two of them, someone is doing the work.

I also experienced a room filled with silence that was only haltingly broken by a few sharply pressed keys. However when I enthusiastically asked more questions and acted like I was having fun the interviewer opened up quite a bit more. The interviewer got up from across the table and helped clarify a point they were making on the white board. The conversation eventually got to the point where it felt something like that linked video, but boy did I have to dance for that.

My experience was that the video might show the ideal interview but not the default one. The default was tense silence and "okays" that barely restrained their judgement. The linked video seems to give an entertainingly wrong impression.

They aren't typing it to see if it compiles. They are typing it because somebody else makes the hire decision and they need a record of what happened in the interview.

> Had I gotten stuck at any point I don't think I would have been able to get any help, certainly not any help like I would get from a coworker in a truly collaborative scenario.

Or perhaps you got to find out exactly what it's like to work with that particular person.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com