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Comment by ohkaiby | Hacker News Reader

Guys... you can tell this is satire, right?

> First, I cannot myself pass this interview. Last time I tried, I got the correct answer after about forty minutes or so. I could get it down with practice, but it doesn't matter-- I think slower than I type. That's a no hire. The point of the interview is to hire extremely talented engineers, not engineers as talented as me.

The humor is so thick in that paragraph that you could cut it with a knife.

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I don't read any humor in it at all. What's supposed to be funny about it?

I can imagine someone wanting to hire an engineer more talented than they are and so asking questions that they themselves wouldn't be able to answer. That just seems logical rather than ironic.

I feel like it would bias your selection towards a fast moving hacker rather than a more methodical person, but that may be exactly what you're looking for in this context.

The author isn't just saying that they themselves couldn't write a Tic-Tac-Toe simulator the first time they were exposed to the problem. The author is saying that after watching candidates work this problem "for years", apparently not even a high level algorithmic idea stuck with them. This is... surprising.

If this was meant as satire or humor, this will be the first time I've read anything on the internet that was meant as satire or humor and been personally unable to detect it. If it was meant humorously (I don't think it was, even after re-reading), it's a bad attempt at humor.

To me that seems obviously not satire. It's even a cliché to say that one should hire people smarter than oneself, not be the smartest person in the room, etc.

The old manager adage is "Hire people smarter than yourself", I don't see how this can be satire, everything he says is very reasonable if you believe that these interviews are a good way to filter candidates. Satire would try to make some jabs at it but there are no jabs against the interviews in this article.

Based on the rather uniform but manic writing style I expect to learn that this was cobbled together with output from GPT-3.

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