Hacker News Reader

Comment by endymi0n | Hacker News Reader

I'd rip you to shreds on that one. It's my second favorite question and after an innocent opening of "What project was the most exciting one you recently did?", I'm usually launching a barrage of follow-up questions that zoom in and out all the time, like:

- Why were you selected for the team and who selected you? - What were the biggest challenges the team faced? - How did you measure you were doing the right thing and you did good work?

And on and on, always drilling down on their answers. It's close to impossible to come up with BS on the fly at that speed and pressure.

This really splits the wheat from the chaff and pure talkers and "team players" who didn't actually contribute anything to their teams' success stand there naked.

View on HN

> I'm usually launching a barrage of follow-up questions that zoom in and out all the time

I would probably fold under this style of questioning even when describing a completely true and even interesting project that stands apart from the random grunt work I usually do. When interviewing other people myself, my style is borderline diffident while asking the candidate, to reduce the chance of nervousness/anxiety influencing their answers.

That being said, I love Justwatch, so clearly your techniques are throwing up some good candidates. All the best! :)

(*) I‘d rip you to shreds if you tried to make up a story on the go.

Happened to me about three times during way more than 300 interviews.

About ten times more candidates actually thanked me for the nicest and most informative interview with actionable feedback they ever had with a company. YMMV.

Looks like I was triggered a bit by parent, it‘s always interesting how much more unbalanced any nuance comes across in writing.

Other than that, I stand by my technique, but it‘s mainly a question of tone. The first whole paragraph of my carefully A/B tested script solely concerns itself with making a candidate comfortable, as interviews prefer natural extroverts.

90% of that time, this question actually ends up in a mutuably enjoyable conversation.

>> Happened to me about three times during way more than 300 interviews.

Yeah - because the other people would simply prepare for their interview, be it bullshit or not.

If I were to come to your interview and were to bullshit you - I would have spent enough time in front of the mirror trying various ways of copying the behaviour of people who did all the work for me. It's not that hard to build up a story once you know where to start from.

>> Other than that, I stand by my technique, but it‘s mainly a question of tone. The first whole paragraph of my carefully A/B tested script solely concerns itself with making a candidate comfortable, as interviews prefer natural extroverts.

I don't know. There are loads of issues I had to deal with and I don't remember how I did that any more. There are even more issues which I would completely agree were "dumb decisions" but be absolutely logical if I looked back and realised were political decisions. Now, if you allowed me to look back at my IM history/code comments and see why I did what I did.

>> 90% of that time, this question actually ends up in a mutuably enjoyable conversation.

So basically what you're testing your interviewees for is how much they have prepared for interviewing with you (they're happy because they were preparing for your questioning/you're happy because they made the right answers). The question is whether their ability at being interviewed correlates with their ability to excuse themselves from doing the job.

> So basically what you're testing your interviewees for is how much they have prepared for interviewing with you (they're happy because they were preparing for your questioning/you're happy because they made the right answers). The question is whether their ability at being interviewed correlates with their ability to excuse themselves from doing the job.

No. All I'm asking them is to come up with a single interesting project within the last three years that they did, be it professional or even a fun one and have some conversation over it. If they didn't do any remotely interesting work or can't talk about it at a high level, how could I possibly expect them to come up with own ideas or communicate about them in the future?

Other than that, you'd be extremely surprised at how little candidates actually prepare on average, even if I tell them in advance exactly what happens in the interview and what I'll be looking for (which I do).

So I do respect your points, but I don't really get them. You may be right. I'm getting the results I want and my teams are happy and productive.

Here's a mail from an interviewee last week:

> Thank you so much for the response! I would have loved to work with you guys, but I do understand. The experience was very helpful to me anyways, [...] Thanks again, and maybe we will work together in the future!

That's fair. I'd just assume that even the good, honest candidates will eventually feel like an interview like that is more of an interrogation, and decide not to come back because their manager doesn't trust them.

Please note I'm not trying to make a personal attack here, my interview style has pretty much always been to keep things simple, straight, and to-the-point. Additionally, most of my interviews are technical, so sorting out behaviors is usually secondary, and the technicality is usually enough information to select candidates on.

I also think pressing in this manner is likely to select less for the honest and more for people able to bullshit their way through better than the interviewer can keep up. Even if the interviewer has a high opinion of their ability.

Yep. Trying to "rip to shreds" is a strong signal to stay away from that place. Good luck with a team full of BS artists.

>- Why were you selected for the team and who selected you? - What were the biggest challenges the team faced? - How did you measure you were doing the right thing and you did good work?

This is again pretty easy to BS. Most people aren't going to completely make something up. Rather, they'll tell a 10% lie where they make up the most critical bits, then fill the rest with "truthful" content based on how things actually work on their company.

Let me turn the tables:

- What's your hit rate? (Detected an actual bullshitter) - What's your false alarm rate? (Labelled someone a bullshitter who wasn't) - How did you arrive at these numbers?

Sure.

- What's your hit rate? (Detected an actual bullshitter)

All of them, I definitely had a few bad hires, but never due to underestimating capability, also most of them were from the early days.

- What's your false alarm rate? (Labelled someone a bullshitter who wasn't)

I see no way to come up with any good number for that, but I think at ~10% hiring rate from the interview I'd call myself pretty average from a perspective of selectiveness at that part in the funnel.

> This is again pretty easy to BS.

This is not the point of the question, I could care less whether 10% are slightly beautified. My focus with this questions and the follow ups are whether candidates can reproduce insights, learnings, hacks and fulfillment of business objectives in a logical and coherent way. If the story is fabricated, it usually falls apart when I ask "why" and "how did you actually do it?"

It's hard to fake expert knowledge about the stability of current sources when I drill down on the details of a candidates' recent Arduino project.

It's interesting and revealing that you (deliberately?) fail to mention how you arrived at these numbers.

It's almost as if you have absolutely no clue how good you actually are at catching bullshitters.

That's not fair or accurate. They said they had a basis for concluding they didn't fail to catch BSers - experience with hires afterwards. They also said they could only guess at the number of false positives.

That means they supported their conclusion where they made one, and refrained from a definite conclusion where they couldn't make one.

Yes, and that basis is based on ... nothing!

Actually, it's worse. The claimed 100% hit rate implies classifying everybody as a bullshitter.

> I'd rip you to shreds on that one.

What a wonderful way to phrase talking about interviewing your potential future co-workers. You must be a very pleasant person to work for.

I thought the same. The kind of interviewer that hides behind the company name to play one's own power trips.

Hard pass on companies that "interview" that way. Toxic.

>"This really splits the wheat from the chaff and pure talkers and "team players" who didn't actually contribute anything to their teams' success stand there naked."

I would argue that your style and attitude would make quality candidates question why they would want to work for someone who views interviews as a full contact sport. Is "ripping people to shreds" part of the culture at Justwatch(your profile states your CEO and Cofounder) then?

Yes, getting edgy over a generic culture fit question struck me as cultish as well. Word goes around, people talk to each other and some candidates will stay away.

Not really. It is usually based in some level of truth, but a good story teller can always work their way around it. The person isn't coming up with BS, but is converting "this is what we would have done" to "this is what we did".

The ability to answer such questions often comes down to how good of a storyteller someone is, rather than the actual value of their experiences. One of my close friends hate BS answers, and will never use tangential experiences to structure an appropriate answer to such questions.

I do not know the degree to which you go in depth with, but a couple of follow up questions is no biggie.

> - Why were you selected for the team and who selected you? - What were the biggest challenges the team faced? - How did you measure you were doing the right thing and you did good work?

So much opportunity for confabulation here. It is ENTIRELY possible to have the brain come up with faux-rationalisations and half-truths. We're literally wired for it. You'll end up biasing towards people who can accurately discern what you're optimising for and mould their words to suit.

I actively avoid companies that do adversarial interviewing like that. It's a key flag for a toxic work culture.

> - Why were you selected for the team and who selected you?

I was there, I was breathing, I was on the payroll.

This one made me laugh out loud.

Whenever I am asked that in an interview, I am usually puzzled if their workplace is some sort of magic kingdom where great tasks are falling from the sky or I am missing some kind of skill to navigate my previous jobs and make my menial tasks more interesting.

But that won't work for every interviewer. In general I think these kinds of questions have little signal.

Contrariwise, weak interview questions give a strong signal to the candidate about the quality of the organization.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com