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Comment by ksec | Hacker News Reader

>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.

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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.

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.

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"

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?

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