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Comment by thechao | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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?

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