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Comment by matz1 | Hacker News Reader

If there are 2 candidate, one can remember stuff and other don't, everything else being equal, who are u going to pick?

Both. Tech companies are ravenous for anyone and everyone who clears the bar; “choose the best from N applicants” is not a model for the hiring process.

If you only can hire one?

Was it Seneca who mocked this line of thinking? If I remember right he mocked it by saying either

1) a good man is a good man and thus equal to other good men

2) you proceed through so many qualifications and “but what if this guy was prettier or had nicer tone of voice than the other good man all else equal” etc until you admit that you include minute details like the exact placement of every hair follicle on some dudes head in your proposed total ordering of humanity

I'll admit there's probably an argument against that method of evaluation, but I'm not exactly blown away by Seneca's arguments.

In particular, I'm not convinced the evaluation must extend from arguably relevant features to obviously irrelevant features. Even if I'm ultimately wrong, I can mount a defensible argument that memory is relevant to programming ability. I do not see a way to mount a defensible argument that (for example) facial features are relevant to programming ability.

His pretty face might leave your superiors with a better impression of your group. A friend manages a software group and actually told me that one of the best things to increase chances of getting a job with her group would be to pay more attention to my appearance and smile more. Also mentioned that just being interpersonally nice was much more important than actual abilities in her organization as long as you were good enough that the owners believed you knew what you were doing and she could justify keeping you there. Etc

Here's one - attractiveness is roughly correlated with intelligence, and in the general case positive traits tend to correlate. An interview is an attempt to extract the maximum amount of information about a candidate in a short space of time. Virtually any positive trait is evidence that somebody will be a better candidate. Weak evidence, yes - but if you have two otherwise completely identical candidates (a silly hypothetical) it's not illogical to choose the one with better hair follicles (a silly outcome of a silly hypothetical).

So choose the one you think it's better, for me its the prettier one. What's wrong with that? It's better than just flipping a coin.

Hopefully the candidates realize that the interview is only the first of many shitty zero-sum games, and they opt for growing positive-sum companies instead.

Or the candidate realize that this is something they too can learn to improve themselves instead of dismissing it.

Improving oneself is a good frame for this. There are so many important and subtle and deep aspects of the craft to improve at. I want to work with people who recognize this and allocate their self-improvement efforts wisely.

Studying API trivia to show off in interviews is about as far off as it gets. So probably I’d choose the candidate who hadn’t done that. I’d rather risk a lazy coworker than one who fixates (even if competently) on the wrong problems. I’ve seen coworkers with that trait seriously drag down a team with low-signal nitpicking on others’ pull requests and designs, for example.

API knowledge is ideally a consequence of familiarity with the craft. Sort of like how vocabulary is a consequence of reading, writing, and interacting with well-read people. I’d rather have a conversation with someone who reads a moderate amount than with someone who decided to memorize the dictionary. The former knows fewer words, but I expect they’ll have more interesting things to say, even if none come across in the first 30 seconds.

Yes studying api trivia doesn't have much use. These stuff doesn't need to be memorized. Ideally you memorize stuff that important to you and likely useful for you.

Let's use your example of memorizing dictionary in some foreign language x. This person will be able to read faster and more efficiently without having to stuck on some unknown word and looking up dictionary every 2 minutes. At this state this person is just simply reading and focusing the brain on the content itself.

Likewise with memorizing programming stuff, the person can now just simply code and freeing the brain to just focus on the problem. Consequently more time to code moderate amount and ensure familiarity with the craft. I think this so called the 10x engineer that the author mentioned.

This relates to my most hated interview question - "If someone else can do what you do but they also have X quality why should we pick you?" Which always makes me want to contemptuously exclaim "Well obviously you shouldn't, fool!"

I have never actually gotten a job where the interview had a variation of that question.

on edit: changed explain to exclaim, don't think it significantly changed the meaning in context however.

Remembering stuff is important, but in an interview, all I expect is that the candidate can remember what they discussed 10-20 minutes ago (in the same interview), and that they use a credible looking syntax that's self-consistent; and that they can explain anything they wrote.

I also give a problem that doesn't use a lot of library functions.

The one that will be a better team member.

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