"I'll spend hours brushing up on Scheme just to test you on something completely irrelevant to the role just because I like playing Resumé Gotcha".
Yeah that's a thanks but no thanks from me. I wouldn't work for this guy in a thousand years.
Yeah that's a thanks but no thanks from me. I wouldn't work for this guy in a thousand years.
As an anecdote, I used to work for a company and would require candidates to know some Ruby, for one guy with several years experience in Python we changed the requirements of the home assignment so he could write it using whatever he wanted. he hands over a nodeJS application claiming he took the opportunity to learn something new(why not Ruby?), seemed like it was well done, so we bring him in for an interview, unlucky for him, there was one member in our team with some nodeJS experience(me), having reviewed the code, I asked him to do a minor feature addition to his own code, he froze, couldn't do it because he didn't write the code(copying from some repo) and didn't know any nodeJS at all, asked him to do it in Python instead and he still couldn't do it, he had just spiced up his resumé with tech we didn't use to see if he could weasel his way in.
Always be hired or not hired for who you actually are!
But if it’s listed as a job requirement, sure start quizzing.
I always try to start with a technical question where the candidate can make a good impression and get confident.
First, it's a natural tendency. If you want to find if somebody "knows" a particular subject, an inexperienced person would start asking for factoids and interpret every incorrect answer as the proof that they don't really know the subject.
Second, many interviewers learn from other interviewers or just by trial and error, or from some courses, many of which have very dubious origins. There are many beliefs that are simply wrong, but still get circulated among interviewers, because nobody does 30 year careers in interviewing React programmers - wonder why...