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Comment by asauce | Hacker News Reader

One of the worst interview questions I have had was "Rate your C++ knowledge from 1 - 10".

I had just finished my second year of college, and although I felt fairly confident in my C++ abilities I had no idea how to answer. I thought it would be best to be honest and said "4" based on the subset of the huge language I knew (honestly this rating was probably too high at the time!).

One of the interviewers was obviously unhappy with the answer, and was unpleasant the rest of the interview. I have always wondered what they expected from such an vague question.

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>One of the worst interview questions I have had was "Rate your C++ knowledge from 1 - 10".

>One of the interviewers was obviously unhappy with the answer, and was unpleasant the rest of the interview. I have always wondered what they expected from such an vague question.

I knew enough of C++ to know my knowledge on the subject is approximately close to Zero.

Basically no one on earth knows C++, they mostly know a subset of it.

*C++ here referring to Modern C++, Pre 2000 era C++ was still manageable.

Edit: On that thought it seems to me every PL in 90s were all manageable. Somewhere along the line things got ugly.

I love asking this question! I almost always get “7” as an answer! Except one notable time: the interviewee said, at first, “seven”... then he stops, slowly makes eye-contact and says “no: 10.” Brilliant! Who does that!?

I’ve interviewed hundreds of candidates; HR has relayed to me that many candidates requested that HR tell me that they loved being interviewed by me, even though the interview was very, very hard; they say they were surprised to learn things, and also happy I was so interested in them as s person.

This always made me happy; I had to sacrifice a teaching career to program.

Curious as to why you love asking this question? I wonder what data you are trying to glean from this question. It's a very subjective question and wouldn't surprise me at all if the number of years experience a candidate has in that language is inversely proportional to the answer you're given.

I often get this question from recruiters hiring front end developers: From 1 to 10, how well do you know Javascript? I've given 8 for as long as I remember but often I think to myself if the people who wrote the V8 engine are 10 by default, there is no way in hell I'm even close to an 8.

Maybe they perceive it as a calibration question: "do you know how much you don't know" and "how much are you going to overpromise if you start here"

A good self-rating strategy in an interview would be to try and percentile yourself among the people based on your knowledge and try to justify it with humility. C++ is huge, I expect I know more than 80% of the people due to (years of experience, different kinds of projects, yada yada), but I feel i have only been able to explore like 50% of the language so far (concretely learn that is) and there’s more to learn like (1, 2, 3..) and probably more that I might have missed completely.

It’s almost always 7. The actual question I ask is “rate yourself on a scale from one to Bjarne”. Bjarne Stroustrup was the principle in the group I did my PhD, and he rates himself a 7, so when interviewees give ‘7’ as the answer, it makes me laugh.

The way I ask the question is done to relax the candidate and make them start to think about the only person who matters in the room: themselves. I’m looking for intellectually curious people; a bit of modesty & self-reflection tend to go along with that.

Technical skill is a bit irrelevant, as essentially no one does the sort of low level SW our team does, anymore.

Do you ask it with or without a reference for what scale you're talking about?

I got a bunch of those once in an interview, but it was fine because they gave good guidelines for what they meant with the numbers and asked about a bit more specific areas.

Do you breed flying pigs too?

It’s just a trap to quiz people on language errata when they say a high number the guy would have been just as unpleasant in a different way.

The safe answer to this horrible question is 7. If they are expecting you to be an expert as an undergraduate, your mentoring possibilities are probably nil. They also probably associate unfamiliarity with inability. You probably wouldn't want to work there.

I agree this is a bad question, but when people ask, they almost always mean relative to your peers. they're not trying to decide whether to hire a summer intern or a senior dev. they just wanted to hear that you were better than most of your classmates.

I guarantee you his/er knowledge was probably a 3 or lower. If this were reddit I would ironically reply they clearly were just jealous of you or didn't believe you had such a well-developed grasp of C++ fresh out of college.

If this was reddit, I would reply how it is funny that you imply that you would not say that on hacker news, but you actually did indirectly

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