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Comment by xtracto | Hacker News Reader

I've got no issue with you making this comment, it is a free Internet and it's nothing wrong.

However I am authentically and intellectually curious what drives you to do so (i.e., spoiling the post)? Is it a need for recognition? Do you believe the post is bad/wrong and feel the need to put the solution so that other people don't have to think about it? Or maybe it is some type of "FU" to the post because you can do it. Or maybe something else that I could not think of?

Really curious to get your POV!

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When I was at reddit, we did a round of hiring where we published some coding puzzles online, and the solution was the email address of where to send your resume.

Most of the responses were, "I don't want your job, I just wanted to know that I solved the puzzle". I actually hit gmail's sending limit trying to reply to everyone to let them know they solved the puzzle.

So I'd say, people like solving puzzles for the sake of it, and getting praise for doing so.

Can you comment on the kind of engineers that were interested in getting a job this way? Did you hire/interview any of them?

To start, let me say that I would never do hiring this way now. It was a flawed way to do hiring.

We ended up interviewing many of them. They were all very interested in the job. In most cases it was their second or third job out of college. ie. not junior engineers.

We got some great engineers out of it. In fact I think most of them are still there a decade later.

> To start, let me say that I would never do hiring this way now. It was a flawed way to do hiring.

I'm curious on why you view it as flawed. At a previous place I worked we had something like that (we had a small puzzle in the code version of the homepage source).

We treated it as one of the several "acquisition channels" we had for our funnel (recruiters, job-boards and job fairs were others). All channels were treated the same with regards to evaluation, so for us it was just an additional way to get candidates.

It's fine if it's one of many channels, but at the time, it was the only way to get considered for the job.

I no longer think quizzes and tests are a good idea.

It's difficult to gauge whether or not there's a sarcastic undertone in your reply. Regardless of that being there, I'd say your active and quite intense engagement on this (arguably very predictable) matter isn't very flattering. Maybe also not in the eyes of a potential employer, so something to consider :)

Yes... I sort of thought about that when writing that comment. It is difficult to show how "authentic" a comment is and its tone in the internet. I even thought of adding a smiley but after reading it thought it might emphasize a hidden meaning.

The reality for me is that I am really fine with that, and I really am curious about the motives. I stuck to HN policy of "interpret the comment a the best of the intentions" so did not worry about the possible bad reading.

From my POV it will be stupid of me to worry, get angry or anything at such types of comments. It happens in the internet and it was expected. In fact, that was not the only comment showing the "solution", but the one which I though might provide some light.

I apologize if the "undertone" of the comment seemed aggressive to you. (and hope this doesn't sound as well haha)

I think it's fine for you to post a puzzle, and fine for people to post the solution.

In general, yeah, but in this case it was specified that it's a recruiter filter. So it's like responding to someone's post that says `myusername [atsign] mydomain [dot] com` with the syntactically easier to harvest version of the email. Obviously undermining someone's explicit privacy preferences. Not unlawful but just selfish.

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