Hacker News Reader

Comment by te_platt | Hacker News Reader

A few years ago the guy I was sharing an office with at work was cleaning off his desk and found a stack of resumes. He said they were all from the batch that I was hired from and asked if I wanted to know why I was picked. Very cautiously I said yes. He told me I was the only one who when really pushed during the technical interview said "I don't know". Their initial strategy had been to start easy on some topic and just keep going deeper until they had a measure of what level the applicant was at. After a certain point they were just surprised at how far people would carry on into nonsense.

View on HN

The older and more confident I got the less I felt a need to 'know everything.' I'm not perfect, but these days when it comes to anything whether it be technical or cultural (e.g. bands or movies) I strive to not be afraid to say "I don't know what that is" and be excited to learn about it.

There's so much out there. I actually picked this up from reading Hacker School's user manual, "no feigning surprise"[1] and of course an xkcd comic[2].

It was a comfort to see an engineer who I highly respect (Dan Abramov) post a list of things he doesn't know[3].

[1] https://www.recurse.com/manual

[2] https://xkcd.com/1053/

[3] https://overreacted.io/things-i-dont-know-as-of-2018/

We HNers really love these kinds of submissions since we think we're so smart.

The top comment is literally someone bragging about how they once got a job with their superior applause-worthy character of saying "idk".

"More intellectual humility was also associated with less “social vigilantism”, defined as seeing other people’s beliefs as inferior."

More like they have a right to their beliefs, inferior or not, as long as they don't try to impose them on me.

I like that we're using the word "we" to make our aggression look more passive. We wouldn't want to give the wrong impression, would we?

I agree with his point.

> people with greater humility have superior...

It's a contradiction in terms. It makes humility look like a tool. One could instead just say "try to be humble".

Comments like these are why I spend more time reading HN comments than the articles

That is an extremely uncharitable read of the comment.

I don't think it comes off as bragging at all, but just an observation of what worked, and how it's interesting that people will go into levels of nonsense to avoid saying they don't know something.

It's really interesting to get a retrospective, once you get to know your co-workers/managers, on what they were thinking when hiring you. It is DEFINITELY NOT what you might expect!

I was once was hired as a "career-changer" because I had worked in one of my early jobs as a science museum staff-member doing demonstrations for school groups. For some reason, the hiring manager thought that was indicative of communication ability and curiosity. I guess it was, but I never thought it to be very important nor formative at the time.

Maybe not formative but selective.

If you lasted at that job it meant you already had those attributes.

As an interviewer at one of the FAANG companies I can confirm this is one tactic we use as well. A lot of people are very confident spewing trash for as long as you'll let them.

After they said "I don't know" I'd then encourage (or nudge) them to derive a solution. It gave me a very good insight into their thought process and their ability to apply their knowledge to solve an unseen problem.

For instance, students (during campus interview) would at some point reach a dead end while explaining process scheduler. However after encouraged to work it out about 70% ended up with some version of timer interrupt. It was fascinating to watch them go through the process.

It depends on what you mean by derive a solution. If a candidate doesn't know an algorithm they couldn't be expected to derive it on the spot.

In many cases the popular algorithms were carefully designed by Computer Scientists as part of their research. People don't pass that type of test because of the ability to derive solutions on the spot, they pass based on their skill at rote memorisation and application.

(I absolutely agree that if despite not knowing they show signs of being able to reason their way towards something sensible - robust, likely to be efficient, etc - that is a very good sign.)

Likewise. I open my interviews with the explicit statement that I’d like them to disclaim when they don’t know, and that furthermore, the discussion is arranged around challenging them until we reach that point. We have less than an hour together and I need to judge your technical abilities in an intrinsically imperfect medium. Help me help you - I can only work with what I’m given. If you bullshit, what I’m given isn’t good.

I don’t really get it. I can perhaps understand that some candidates might have gotten good feedback from blatantly guessing in the past, but that’s why I now explicitly tell them to disclaim guesses. If anything it looks more impressive when you honestly don’t know something but intuit the substantially correct answer (as long as it’s something that could be realistically intuited).

Yet even with my disclaimer, I’ve still conducted phone screens and onsite interviews where the candidate eventually started bullshitting. It’s one thing to say you don’t know and give a wildly incorrect answer - at least then I can try and steer the interview towards another of the candidate’s strengths. It’s even okay to preface your wild guess with an, “I think...”. But the cavalier way in which people will just spout nonsense is disturbing. Even if you’ve been performing well up to the point, engaging in bullshit is nearly immediate grounds for me to discount you as a candidate.

Obviously that is part of the point of the interview, though, right?

You are able to identify these over-confident people and prevent them from being a toxic influence on a team.

Well yeah, that's why I continue to ask. I guess what I was getting at is that I'm sort of shocked people will still bullshit despite my explicit declaration ahead of time.

Same thing when I interview people. I don’t know is a sign of confidence to me. It is the right answer in so many situations. Unless you have a reasonable shot at deriving the answer on the spot, it’s what more people should be saying, and not only in interviews.

Agree. Although a better answer is (sometimes) I don't know, but... and some indication of how they might get to the answer.

That’s my usual prompt. How much do you know about the domain, how long will it take you to know.

That's reminiscent of the nasty version of 20 questions, where everyone bar the subject is told the only rule is to give an answer that is consistent with previous answers.

Never been on the receiving end, but what I've seen you don't want to be on the receiving end.

"The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge" - Stephen Hawking

That’s been my go-to interview technique for years. I want to see candidates say they don’t know under pressure.

Unless it’s for a very senior role, I think attitude and personality are greater predictors of success than technical competency, so long as their technical competency is ‘good enough’ to begin with.

I'd say attitude and personality are greater predictors of success than technical competency for very senior level people too. I can't think of many people who reach senior levels with poor attitude and personality. And those that do often hit a wall. Eventually, their attitude and personality gets in the way of their brilliance and other people's willingness to work with them.

I think it doesn't matter only in cases where you were the guy who started it all or you're some crazy skilled mercenary for hire brought in only for emergencies. You can treat people like crap for as much as you want if you're in control like that. Maybe it's even necessary for those unicorn situations. And yet, even Linus Torvalds has said that he needed to change.

Finally, I'd say poor attitude and personality lends itself to arrogance, which also makes technical people hit a wall because their arrogance decreases their technical curiosity. Improving one's skill really does require a certain intellectual humility.

> I'd say attitude and personality are greater predictors of success than technical competency for very senior level people too.

Yeah I’d agree. But I think somebody with a good attitude, who can get on well with others, has a greater chance of being able to quickly fill in any competency gaps they have in non-senior positions. For senior positions, the baseline is higher. I’d hire somebody with good character, but inadequate competency (within reason) for a lower IC position, but for a senior position, I’d want both.

"I don't know" is often the best answer.

I was listening to some Christian on a video criticizing atheists and saying something related to the god of the gaps fallacy.

He commented something along the lines of "you have to have an answer to these things!"

No. No you don't.

You don't just invent some fairy tale just because you don't understand something.

Often the best answer is "I don't know"

maybe that knowledge makes them hireable after they go to the Heaven

To be fair, both christians and atheists who are interested in debating each other tend to have a hard time understanding the limits of their knowledge. The criticism can be directed equally in both directions.

The entire sum of scientific knowledge is based on unprovable axioms, just the same as the entire sum of religious knowledge is based on unprovable axioms. Faith is a belief in something you can’t prove, and people have faith in scientific knowledge in exactly the same way that others have faith in religious knowledge.

A wise person would understand that scientific knowledge and the various forms of religious knowledge are based on completely different foundational axioms, and as a result, any attempt to debate the merits of one over the other is entirely pointless. A wiser person might understand that criticising somebody for what they choose to have faith in is both pointless and hypocritical.

Faith is a belief in something without evidence, correct?

Science is rooted in empirical evidence. It may be with imperfect models and imperfect measurement, but there is indeed fairly reasonably-measured evidence.

Faith is a belief in something you can’t prove. The munchausen trilemma invalidates all logical proofs. As such, all forms of knowledge are based on unprovable axioms from which knowledge is derived. If you were to try generalise some of the axioms that form the foundation of scientific knowledge, you might say that ‘empirical evidence is a source of absolute truth’ or that ‘everything we don’t understand about the physical world will either be explained by science, or is not possible to explain’. Any individual might consider those ideas and decide that they are worthy of having faith in, or they might not. But any unprovable axiom has no more or less merit than any other unprovable axiom. To say otherwise is to be ignorant to the limits of your own knowledge. You might say that scientific knowledge is more complex or rigorous than religious knowledge, but that doesn’t speak to its merit either. Flat earthers rigorously promote an incredibly complex system of beliefs, it is naturally more complex than science, because it needs to add additional ideas to explain scientific ideas that conflict with their own. That doesn’t speak to its merits at all.

What is your definition of "prove"?

Just the ordinary dictionary definition. Using evidence and arguments to establish a fact or truth.

Of course the arguments and evidence that you use to prove your truth must also be proven themselves, and so and and so forth. No matter what it is you’re trying to prove, there are only three possible outcomes. Circular reasoning, infinite regression, or stopping at an arbitrary point (usually described as an axiom). This is known as the munchausen trilemma.

Although this question has lead me to see that my previous argument is incomplete. It is possible to believe a truth without faith. That is, through ignorance. A failure to scrutinize your belief sufficiently to understand that it is based on an unprovable axiom, and is thus an act of faith. People who debate the merits of science vs religion tend to be ignorant of this, equally on both sides.

Nothing about what I’m arguing is even remotely controversial. It would be a part of any entry level course on logic at any university.

The Faithful would also call just about anything “evidence”.

Faith is not belief in something without evidence, it’s belief in something without proof. The mere existence of evidence does not constitute proof.

A wise person might also be aware that words can have multiple meanings, that "faith" is one of those words, and that equivocation fallacies don't make for good reasoning.

The general meaning of the word is belief in any idea that you can’t prove. Belief in scientific knowledge requires no more or no less faith than belief in any religious system.

Yes, I am aware that you can use equivocation fallacies to explain that we can't know anything and all claims are equally likely to be true. I was talking about what a wise person would do, though.

Please don't cross into rudeness in HN threads. Also, please do religious flamewar somewhere else, not here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Would you mind explaining what about my comment was either rude or a flame, given the context in which rationality was named as a sign of being unwise?

Any comment of the form, "Yes, I am aware that you can do stupid thing X, but I was talking about intelligent thing Y" is rude and a flame.

... when "stupid thing X" is making an argument that doesn't address the problem, and "you can do stupid thing X" is actually an explanation of what the problem with that argument is, and it's also not calling anyone names, but just calling out fallacious reasoning as what it is: Fallacious reasoning? Fallacious reasoning might well be correlated with stupidity, but that doesn't make pointing out fallacious reasoning an insult in itself.

Equally, if the topic of the discussion is what makes a certain decision wise or not, as it happened to be the case here, I don't see how pointing out that a suggested methodology does not qualify due to fallacious reasoning in that methodology is either rude or a flame. That is, unless you consider the start of that discussion (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20129547) a rude flame, which you possibly could, even though I don't think it was intended as such.

I'm afraid I'm not really following this. In a way it doesn't matter, though, because even if I missed some subtlety in perceiving your comment as rude, I can guarantee you that most readers would miss that subtlety as well. Since there are plenty of ways to make your substantive points, why not just choose ones that don't straddle that line?

I don't consider this a fair description of the two realms of inquiry.

Of course. Choosing to value a set of beliefs that make the most sense to you is how we give meaning to our lives. We all have opinions about what makes sense and what doesn’t. The only thing we can’t do is prove anything to be an absolute truth.

I do a lot of interviewing... I've found that folks who say "I don't know, but I'd guess x based on y" is a fantastic answer. Lets me know how they are thinking as they walk through an educated guess.

Please keep religious flamewar off this site.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Reply on news.ycombinator.com