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Comment by microtherion | Hacker News Reader

15 years ago, one of the "soft questions" I liked to ask in phone interviews was "If I were to look at your bookshelf right now, what books would I see there?"

Nowadays, I keep nearly all my books electronically; I still have a sizable bookshelf, but the books are gathering dust.

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When conducting interviews in the U.S., I'm very careful when asking soft questions like that.

If a candidate's answer included a book that touched on a topic from some legally-protected class (e.g., race, religion, or sexuality) and that person didn't get hired, it could be one more piece of ammunition in a hiring-discrimination lawsuit. (I do wonder if I'm being overly cautious on this.)

I'd probably rework the question to something like, "Have you found any good books, websites, etc. that you've found useful for growing the skills this position requires?"

Not to sound like a jerk, but that sounds a little paranoid to me.

You’re entitled to your opinion, but what GP is saying is factually correct.

Not offense taken. It's hard to know if it's overly cautious or not.

Company legal and HR advice seems very conservative considering how rarely I hear about such lawsuits actually happening.

But I'm hiring on behalf of the company, so I let the people above me choose their risk tolerance.

It's their job to be defensive. Given the low frequency of incidents, it can appear paranoid because they appear to be defending against something that never happens from a individual point of view.

I so dislike questions like that. In my opinion, a job interview shouldn't attempt to judge someone as a whole person. It should measure their ability to perform the job, nothing more. If a lizard showed up and demonstrated that it can perform the job, I'd hire the lizard.

That approach might work best when hiring a solo contractor to write the firmware for an outer space probe.

In my line of work, we operate in sizable teams, and write software that evolves continuously over several years. Under such circumstances, factors other than being able to solve a coding problem in isolation inevitably come into play.

Another concern is that we don't want to hire somebody just for being able to solve today's problems, today, but somebody we expect to solve, down the line, problems we don't even know exist yet. Learning styles matter in that context.

That said, the concerns you and others in this thread have raised about the subjectivity of evaluating answers to such a question are not without merit. But now that I'm asking more coding questions, I would argue that there is plenty of subjectivity in evaluating the answers to those as well.

Yes and no. Such a question tells whether, how and what the person is learning.

Lots of people can do the job. Is this person a learner? And what kind of learner. Learn on the job? Learn in your free time? And what does this person like to learn?

Giving someone a work task and seeing if they can complete it is unbiased and non gameable. Using kitchen psychology to deduce "are they a learner" gives your biases a free pass and is super gameable once candidates catch on.

You can game the work task too right? Someone posts the question on glassdoor before you realize...

Here's the thing though. I don't want to work with an engineer who hasn't read anything technical in the last year. Don't care how good of a problem solver they are, if they don't teach themselves things they probably aren't very passionate about the profession.

I think as a society, we shouldn't require people to be passionate about their jobs to put food on the table. Jobs should be just jobs. The days when the internet was a beacon of light are long gone, today expecting "passion" about CRUD apps or ad-tech is just fake corporate mentality.

For a tech job, learning isn't really about passion (necessarily). It's part of the job requirements, because you'll almost certainly need to use technologies you aren't familiar with. This doesn't require you to have a shelf full of tech books of course.

Yeah but not every job is like that.

> I don't want to work with an engineer who hasn't read anything technical in the last year.

Last year I took a year-long sabbatical and went to New Zealand. I spent half of that time offline. During that, I read 4 technical books. I really enjoyed that.

Before and after that I don't really have the time to read through a book in a meaningful way. After work my brain is to tired to focus more than a few pages. I still read relevant blog posts that are usually more dense and short so I don't loose focus while reading.

Yeah you definitely need to moderate how much energy you give your job if you want to have a life and also make investments in yourself.

Tell me some truly objective methods to find out if someone is skilled.

There is always a subjective reason why someone can fail.

Whiteboards? Some don't perform well with those. Take-home assignments? People can lookup solutions. Everything can be used.

Asking someone: what did you learn in the last year? How? And what did you gain out of it?

These don't seem hard and unfair questions to ask.

That doesn't sound right to me.

You are saying loud and clear you assess how good an engineer is fit for a role literally judging part of personal life based on your own (100% unbiased, right?) inference process.

No I didn't say anything like that, and to be honest, I don't generally ask such a question. However, in some cases, for example if you are a Junior, it's interesting to know how you learn, what drives you, etc. A book, a course, whatever, can give an idea. I mean, sure you can lie, you can fake all the certificates you want, but then eventually you'll join the company and there is the probation period. If you are not someone that likes to learn, it comes up relatively quickly. I think it's a fair question to ask, nothing to base the entire decision on.

I find it funny that I received a lot of criticism for this, when companies out there are still giving people BS riddles and "find the leaf with the value 'x' in a binary tree in O(logn)", or whatever crap they ask, to assess how good an engineer is, however, asking for how someone learns, how updated someone is, etc., is a something you should not take into account, while I find this very important, because it shows an important aspect of the person's attitude.

I think that we should stop hiring coders, and we should start hiring people. And people have interests, such as reading, fishing, etc.

I don't like electronic technical books. I find it too hard to find what I'm looking for in them. I find it's hard to beat being able to quickly flip through a physical book.

> I find it too hard to find what I'm looking for in them.

That’s how I feel about physical books…

> I find it's hard to beat being able to quickly flip through a physical book.

I find it hard to beat Ctrl+F.

On the other hand, I enjoy having electronic versions of technical books because I can search for things in them.

Yes, plus you often get updates nowadays, which, depending on the domain of the book, can be pretty important.

I even like to print out a lot of technical documentation. For instance, I’ve printed the Tutorial from the Python documentation, as well as the regular expressions module. It was really handy to be able to look through it wherever I wanted, mark it up, and reference it easily.

One of my biggest gripes is when documentation does not have a PDF.

On the one hand, I prefer the feel of a physical book but I find myself reading them less because I can't read them quite as easily for fun (i.e. trying reading Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler while lying down without breaking your nose or arms)

I too would much prefer to read a paper book, but after going through a major move between metro areas I realized how many of these physical books just spent most of their time sitting there, unused.

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