I once interviewed fresh out of college for a tech job at a big shop. When the interviewer got to the puzzle questions, they prefaced with ‘And be honest if you’ve heard it before. We want to get one you haven’t heard.’

Seven puzzles later of me saying, “yes, I’ve heard that one” and giving an short description indicating that I understood the solution, the interviewer became visibly upset/annoyed.

And so when they asked the 8th question I suddenly ‘didn’t know this one.’ The interviewer was delighted. Of course I did know it already but pretended to work my way through it.

Got the offer, didn’t take it because that interviewer would’ve been my boss’ boss.

Lying (misleading) is a complicated subject. Though some use it to excuse too much, lying and misleading can actually help things flow smoothly and justly.

In this case, if the interviewee had been radically honest and interviewer had not had a backup question, the interview might have gone badly, even though the interviewee apparently was a good employ.

In fact, radical/extreme honesty is often seen as a sign of childhood problems or mild autism by mental health practitioners, as people normally learn to white lie at young age.

If you are fit for the job role, then no. The employer is misleading themselves by thinking that a silly interview question is a good measure of a person's ability to fill a role.

GP is in fact, doing the employer a favour by bypassing this silly charade and letting them have access to his real talents.

Knowing an answer is one thing, being able to explain it is another one. You can easily spot people who "cheat" by rote learning.

As long as you can actually walk them through your thought process on how you came up with the answer, I think you're good.

But a good interviewer should also follow up on questions that can lead to trivia-type answers.

For example, if some interviewer ask you "What is the sum of integers from 1 to 100", a valid answer from you could be

"Well we learned in school that Gauss figured out this problem at early age, and came up with the answer 5050 - so the answer is 5050"

In which case the interviewer has the options of

A) Conclude the question, and move onto something else

B) Try to get you to expand on this theory - and how Gauss came up with that

If he then goes with B, and you start explaining that (1 + 100) + (2 + 99) + ... + (50 + 51) equals 5050, he could ask you to come up with a more general form of this answer - i.e the sum of some arbitrary arithmetic sequence.

And if you then go to expand on this, and arrive at the answer that the sum of the original sequence is sum = s(s+1)/2, then that is IMO very good for both parts.

The key here is that you actually walk them through the steps, and interact with the interviewer. Maybe they introduce constraints, or new rules.

One can take "easy" questions that you've seen thousands of times, and make them into interesting ones, where you spend some time communicating, and showcasing how you solve problems.

The point is not to arrive at "the sum is 5050", but rather to monitor how you think, and solve problems, with people around you.

Well interview's typically have a trick question... Perhaps this was a trick answer

Employers mislead employees all the time. You could say the hiring process was unethical as it rewarded having googled questions instead of actual competence, thus robbing a worthy engineer of their job.

I've been sitting here for 5 minutes feeling horrified and sad that your comment is downvoted to near unreadability for suggesting that lying like that in an interview may be unethical, while a sociopathic-sounding child comment extolling the virtues of lying/misleading – they "can actually help things flow smoothly and justly", without lying "the interview might have gone badly" and lecturing you on "radical honesty" being a sign of problems/mild autism like you're a naive idiot who just doesn't understand the world – isn't downvoted at all. I wouldn't call it "radical honesty" not to lie in a situation like this! Sounds like "radical honesty" has a new meaning "not lying in any situation you could gain an advantage by doing so".

This reminds me of another time on HN someone told a story about how they'd cheated in a hi-tech way in an exam and a dozen comments supported them, not one person suggesting it might be wrong...until me, then I got virulently attacked for doing so. At least there their comment got [dead]ed.

I just wanted to say - you're not alone, that also seems very dodgy to me. Moments like this HN is very disappointing.