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Remember when people talk about their bad experiences interviewing at companies and write things like:

"The 4th Interviewer was really bad. Sat there lobbing obscure questions about XYZ to prove he was smarter than me"

and subject of the post is something like "Why I'll never work for Google".

They are talking about you.

To be fair, these days I'm not interviewing for Google, but for another large tech company. I'm not asking obscure "gotcha" questions. I'm softening them up and digging under the superficial to get unguarded answers to my questions.

> Rather than downvote, instead reflect on the fact that if you interview, you'll often be on the receiving end of this

You don't understand. I don't want the job because that would mean having to interact with you.

>Rather than downvote, instead reflect on the fact that if you interview, you'll often be on the receiving end of this. And think about how to prepare.

Eh - none of my good jobs had this style of interviewing. I'm not sure I'm missing out on anything.

I am gauging the interviewer from a human perspective, and you're exhibiting behavior that I cannot respect. In general, I advise people not to work in teams if they don't respect their coworkers, and never if they don't respect their manager.

I like discussing these topics in interviews, as long as it's not a one way discussion. For the last job I interviewed, I got loads of interrogation style behavioral questions from all the interviewers (you can likely guess which company). Yet none of my interviewers could answer a simple question adequately:

"What are the reasons people leave the team/company?"

Very tempted to have acted like you did when they gave lame answers.

Edit: I think my comment doesn't convey my thoughts well, so I'll give another stab at it.

In general, if you want people to be open with you, there needs to be some kind of reciprocity. Playing psychological games causes people to raise their guards, and the natural response is not to give you what you want or be evasive. In an interview setting, that doesn't look good - so the next natural response is deception. Your style of questioning (I'm guessing here as you didn't give details) does a good job of eliciting the behavior you are trying to weed out. And then as a result, you get confirmation because you think you've caught out a guy trying to deceive you. Yet your behavior is likely a serious contributing factor.

As someone who ALSO does these interviews, it sounds like you're doing more harm than good. Interviews are never the place for adversarial questioning or psychological games. If you wouldn't feel comfortable writing your questions and their answers verbatim in your interview feedback, you shouldn't ask them.

Getting a useful signal is as much about the interaction as the questions, and if you're acting like a jerk then the most appropriate response for a strong culture fit is for the candidate to not want to work with you. Which is probably not something you're capturing very well.

I don't think I'm acting like a jerk. One benchmark I use when extracting "ground truth" from otherwise highly guarded candidates is whether they realize at all what techniques I've used to draw it out from them.

Not going to comment on the downvote, but based on the responses, it's likely that people don't just disagree with your approach here, but also think you're wrong and that it's ineffective. Let me go into detail regarding that:

> It also helps that I have absolutely nothing to lose and can walk into the room refreshed and cool as a cucumber, while the candidate has a job on the line and has already been hit with at least a couple of really tough and nerve-wracking technical questions. This stacks the deck massively in my favor.

You don't know this. Your candidate doesn't necessarily have a job on the line. They may have several offers in hand, and they may only be screening to get more offers into the mix. They may know that it's a candidate's market right now, but it doesn't mean they don't have good alternatives, and it doesn't mean that you aren't permanently leaving a bad impression on the candidate you're interviewing, one that will follow you even if you don't remain at the company you're at. You're slowly poisoning the pool of candidates in your extended network, and while it may not bite you immediately, there's a fair chance that by the time you see the ramifications of your actions, it will be too late.

In particular, you treating this like a "game" or a "playing field" to be outmaneuvered speaks volumes to the low level of professionalism you place on the interviewing process, and it makes you a real liability to the company. This is the cultural brand that you're communicating to folks being introduced to your company, and it's not a competitive one. In a large company, the relative effect may end up being significantly small and diluted, so much that while negative, it never ends up being a problem for your direct manager. On the other hand, if some kind of feedback loop ever emerges that connects this kind of pattern of behavior to you that your hiring manager looks at, I wouldn't be surprised if you receive a stern conversation and expectation for change. Of the engineers I've managed over the years, this sort of behavior is a huge red flag. It's an unforced error and a huge liability, and this sort of behavior when you think there are no repercussions tells you a lot about someone. This kind of personality is usually the first to go or that I manage out, because it's not great raw material for building the culture and collaboration I want to see.

I do appreciate your very well-thought-out feedback. For the record, I don't think anyone here can diagnose my effectiveness and contribution to my company from a few dozen words in a HN post.

As I recall Joseph Campbell once highlighted, the Japanese have a have a distinct tense in describing what they do as roughly equivalent to the English phrase "to play at." The idea isn't to make what you do overly templatized or rigid. When I talk about approaching an interaction as a "game," what I mean is that I try to stay fluid and engage in a non-formulaic manner.

Like it or not, candidates will almost always try to present a perfect image of themselves. However there's a "real story" under every veneer, and it's always a challenge to figure out what that real story is. I know plenty of interviewers who complain about never getting any real signal from their culture fit interviews, and when I dig deeper on why, it's because they came in with a set of questions, asked those questions verbatim, and wrote down the responses verbatim (as another reply to my comment suggested is the "right" approach). Most of the time, the candidate gave a guarded and carefully filtered narrative to all the questions. Nothing genuine makes it onto the table.

My argument is that the less effective results tend to come from a failure to "play at" interviewing! And it can be done completely respectfully and tactfully, leaving the candidate with a sense of having really connected with the interviewer.

>For the record, I don't think anyone here can diagnose my effectiveness and contribution to my company from a few dozen words in a HN post.

> It also helps that I have absolutely nothing to lose and can walk into the room refreshed and cool as a cucumber, while the candidate has a job on the line and has already been hit with at least a couple of really tough and nerve-wracking technical questions"

Yes, I do think I can diagnose your effectiveness and contribution at least when it pertains to hiring in so far as this attitude is 99.9% of the time an extreme liability. If you work at big tech companies, it won't matter because you've never had to own the results of that mistake, but if you ever run your own company, you'll learn this lesson the hard way really quickly.

What you don't seem to understand is that interviewing is just as much a sales process as it is a measurement. Your argument that candidates try to present a perfect image of themselves is just that, an argument. Have you ever interviewed a candidate that candidly admitted their unvarnished struggles because they know that showing the strength and fortitude to admit that indicates a level of maturity and security that they want to communicate? Would it surprise you if I told you that these candidates tend to be the ones that have multiple offers?

It's around the same time that you realize how much expanding the team by a single engineer can add to the bottom line of the company (and conversely what the lost opportunity cost is) that you stop thinking like this. Frankly, I don't mind if you do this because very selfishly, as a hiring manager, your loss is my gain. If all of my competition wizened up over night and stopped making unforced errors like this, it would make it slightly harder for me to hire. But given that this is HN, in good faith, I do feel like it's worth giving you the warning here -- what you're doing is not a great strategy.

> Also, don't do shitty things at work.

Like play "psychological games" with prospective hires?

What does that select for, people who can more effectively be sycophants and kiss ass?

> I also love playing psychological games, with the goal of breaking down their "I must project an image of a perfect human being" armor.

Go into more detail. What questions/techniques do you typically reach for to do this?

Why are you approaching this as a competition or a battle? You clearly haven't been doing management for more than a few years if this is your perspective.

>"It also helps that I have absolutely nothing to lose and can walk into the room refreshed and cool as a cucumber, while the candidate has a job on the line and has already been hit with at least a couple of really tough and nerve-wracking technical questions"

And yet I'm guessing you don't own the company where you are exhibiting this sociopathic behavior. If so why do you feel it's acceptable to represent someones else's company like this? You sound like the person whose been at the same place for too long but rather than searching out new challenges elsewhere just stays put and creates toxicity.

They've been at Google for a while now and it's gone to their head. The funny thing is that the most talented, most intelligent people I know that work in tech are some of the most extremely humble and kind as well. They command far more respect with their quiet strength than he/she does with their bullying nature.

That's been my experience as well. It's seems it's always mediocrity and insecurity that feels the need to bully.

I've left Google, but I went to work for another large tech company. I guess I do have to admit that a lot's gone to my head!