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Comment by teddyh | Hacker News Reader

There are two quite large problems with this:

1. Asking them to talk to you as if they know you is implicitly asking them to reveal quite a lot about their personal life; a life which you, as a prospective employer, has absolutely no business poking your big nose into. Don’t ask about their personal life.

2. As “JMTQp8lwXL” pointed out in another reply, this also opens your selection up to selection bias to prefer your personal preferences, not what would be good for the role. This kind of thing is, unfortunately, rampant, and leads to enormous monocultures where everybody who works at a certain place seems to be the same person; they all dress the same, like the same things, talk the same, and look the same. This is the very opposite of diversity.

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> This is the very opposite of diversity.

And of course diversity for diversitys sake is the highest principle there is.

Also, all people with similar interests are carbon copies of one another.

Yeah, I don't see having a monoculture as really that terrible, depending on the type of work being done. It can be more efficient and have less interpersonal conflict than a workplace where everyone has a different perspective, gets offended by things the other person doesn't intend to be offensive, requires more communication to get on the same page, etc.

As you sarcastically pointed out, diversity for diversity sake is a false virtue IMO.

I think the larger problem is how much you've over thought and extrapolated on straws with this reply

Where is this asking "quite a lot about their personal life" ?

I did say that it was implicit, but “having a conversation with the other person like if they were a human being” seems to imply that they are having an informal conversation as in simply shooting the breeze. In such a conversation as an interviewee, it is hard to remain professional and separate your personal and workplace activities, and this seemed to be what the interviewer was aiming for, in order to get to know them better.

This all seems reasonable to me. If you're worling with other ppl, why not have them be people you might vibe with?

I think they meant not reading algorithmic questions of a list in a robotic way.

GP seems like someone who interviews like I interview. I never ask candidates to talk about their personal life. I ask them to tell stories, and I try to understand whether they can reflect on their experiences and form a narrative. I’ve found that technical ability alone isn’t a great predictor of success. What matters is more that the candidate can communicate their thoughts fluently and that they give some consideration to their goals and how to work with others to achieve them. So I ask behavioral questions. And I ask questions and prompt people because I want to make sure I got a good story out of them. Some people don’t immediately trust you with a good story so I try to establish trust first. I do that by actually telling them what they’d be doing and why and what my employer is about first.

I’d rather hire for those skills plus code reading ability because I’ve honestly never used a single “algorithm” in my entire working life.

People are normally at least discouraged to talk about what they did at a previous employer at any level of detail; there might even be NDAs involved. So, when you don’t explicitly ask candidates about their personal life, but ask them to “tell stories”, what do you expect them to talk about?

Employers seem to be entirely ignorant of the power relationship in job interviews; interviewers all want to talk to the candidates like a peer, even though this is not at all appropriate.

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