An open-source collection of interview questions | Hacker News Reader

An open-source collection of interview questions

counter-interview.dev

132 pointsorthodoz27 comments

Perhaps drifting slightly OT, but this is a good example of why I'm not a fan of the current trend to make the "any questions for us?" section of interviews evaluative.

I get the theory, that good people ought to ask smart questions, but it feels trivially hackable the same way all those stupid brain teaser questions from '90s interview processes were. In other words, professional interviewees - the kind of people who memorise answer books, question lists, etc. - will outperform people who are smart and skilled but don't approach things in exactly the way the scoring checklist expects.

(Bonus points if you penalise people for not asking about something which was easily discoverable from Glassdoor, industry contacts or even your own company website.)

> the kind of people who memorise answer books, question lists, etc. - will outperform people who are smart and skilled

If people who just memorize can outperform smart people, it just means that the one conducting the interview is not really smart, and so incapable of recognizing expertise.

As someone who has had far more failures at evaluating candidates than successes, I find it very hard to wade through the BS in a meeting that lasts an hour or two. The strangest people I've met seemed normal for that short of time. I usually have to work with someone for up to six months to get a real feeling of their ability to adjust to new situations, learn new technology, and strength of work ethic.

That's what I saw my whole life. People conducting interview don't know how to spot BS and fraud.

> If people who just memorize can outperform smart people, it just means that the one conducting the interview is not really smart, and so incapable of recognizing expertise.

No, it means that interviewing is a lousy way to select people and it's full of bias. We know this. We know that interviewing doesn't select the best candidate.

> it's full of bias

My comment was not saying the opposite.

> best candidate

I never was talking about best candidate.

Their very first example question is "Do you use source control?", taken from a year 2000 post of Joel on Software.

I think this is no longer a good question. (The answer will almost certainly be the affirmative, and the person asking it might sound unaware.)

I don't think it is unreasonable to ask something like "What's your strategy for source control?" - not everyone uses git for everything and even if they do there is plenty to talk about.

Good point; the question could be, "What source control do you use?" Or ask about unit testing, CI, deployment, etc.

If asking something like that you may want to carefully ask how widely adopted the policies they mentioned actually are....

“Yes. We do have a unit test. An intern wrote it last summer.”

"We think he ran it, but he left" ;-)

You'd think that, but some legacy systems might not have it, I don't want to name and shame, but a lot of our code is on an IBM Series i (used to be called as400?) and the source control for it is basically manually adding a comment with the ticket number next to any changes - unsurprisingly they're a bit coy about the technologies used in interviews and target people fresh out of uni who don't know any better, my recruiter told me it was a Java role lol

We've got as400 at work, surprisingly a lot of companies still run it. Thankfully, I do 0 work on it and focus on other applications.

It is becoming a super niche market, once the dinosaurs die off, whoever can come in and work on it will make bank. In fact my company is getting pretty anxious about it, as the cost of even migrating from it is going to be high.

I've thought of doing a startup for that kind of problem: basically, we'd partner-ish with one enterprise customer as a kind of skunkworks attempt to migrate their legacy system to some other platform, at low cost, by leveraging the language development and DSL facilities of Racket. We could hire some top engineers because we tell them we will pay them money to hack Racket. And we keep rights to the Racket part. That first solution is biased to the first customer -- the particular dialects/versions of language they use, other software/facilities they use, their programming conventions and internal libraries, and how they want to map to which new platform. The next enterprise customer we go to, we have a lot less tooling work to do. After a few iterations of that, we have either a semi-turnkey solution, or a proven approach for our team of highly-paid consultants.

As a bit of evidence in support of Racket being a secret sauce for this, I'd point to how ITA Software (before they were aquired by Google) leveraged Lisp to integrate a new, modern node with the IBM legacy airline reservation system network. They publicly stated that a Lisp was what made this effort viable.

(But doing a Web site or app is so much easier and less risky. VCs are set up to give a site/app dotcom wads of money, and want to see you go through the funding rounds and acquisition/IP. And the technical problems are usually well-understood from the start, and it's just a matter of execution. And you can pick a site/app idea that doesn't involve having to do difficult enterprise sales courtships. Also, personally, given that I started working young, so some of the dates on my resume cause my job applications to be deleted instantly, I'm not anxious to be adding showstopper keywords like AS/400 to my resume.)

To make it really open, would be better if the collection was stored as Github issues. Less shiny website but easier to add and no curation process (PRs may be refused, aka censored)

Not every open database should be on Github...

The content could be automatically mirrored to github issues or vice versa

If you want contributors, it’s a zero-cost and stable solution.

thanks for the suggestion!

It seems odd to me to call this "open source" when I can't find a statement of license or copyright on the site (maybe I missed it?).

I would expect something like a Creative Commons license to make it clear what can be reused and under which conditions.

It's under MIT: https://github.com/oleg-koval/counter-interview.dev/blob/mas...

But yes, this should me more explicitly mentioned if they are advertising it as "open-source".

So now we have open source questions? Really? "open source" questions?

Yes. The source to the code containing the collection is open. Hence, open source.

Yeah, source as in text form, not some binary that your brain compiles those letters into!

There's a difference between collaborative and open source. A collection of interview questions can be qualified as collaborative, not open source.

Wow tone down the design. What's going on here.

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