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Comment by mmartinson | Hacker News Reader

I interview a lot of candidates over zoom for remote positions. For me, few to none of the specific details matter. What's important is if the candidate demonstrates that they've had the empathy and self awareness to consider how their call setup affects others' ability to communicate with them. All the suggestions in the linked article seem painfully obvious for anyone working in 2021.

I actually prefer when the candidate has some sort of uncontrollable distraction that comes up during the interview. It provides a good opportunity to see how they handle the real world challenges of remote work. For anyone not sure how to handle this, interrupting with "excuse me, I'm going to mute for 20 seconds while garbage truck passes" is completely reasonable, even in a fairly formal situation.

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Yeah, every so often I'll encounter someone who somehow still hasn't figured out basic conference call courtesy, and it boggles my mind especially given how we've all been remote for over a year. That should have been plenty of time to smooth over any rough habits...

But still there's the odd meeting where, with 30 people attending, one person shows up and blasts everyone with heavy breathing, dog barks, screaming kids and forces the presenter to say "hey, we've got some background noise, can everyone make sure they're muted?"

In my mind this kind of thing is akin to failing at basic hygiene, and it probably infuriates me more than it should.

You get enough people on a call, someone's gonna miss something, even if everyone knows how to handle calls and is trying to do the right thing.

Yeah, that's fair. I can't imagine being that person, but perhaps I'm uncommonly neurotic about making sure I'm muted.

The other factor is that, once calls start getting large enough, it's highly likely that you've got people on who don't do many group calls or video chats, or don't often use the program the organizer's chosen so are more likely to not notice they aren't muted, or not realize that this one doesn't join muted-by-default like their preferred one does, or whatever.

I've noticed a strong preference for actual conference calls, as in, calling a phone number, in certain companies, and I think consistency-of-interface and the fact that no-one, including people from outside the org, need to have a certain program available or installed, is part of the reason.

We use Webex a lot in this way, personally, I get very little or no value from seeing video. The novelty of seeing people in the grid wore off pretty quickly.

I was totally embarrassed the first time I was "that guy" whose eating noises were audible on a huge call. Thankfully someone chatted at me, and I was able to mute. I consider it equivalent to having something in your teeth at this point, and I treat it as an opportunity to do that person a favor by letting them know, instead of condescending to them.

A decent microphone and interface should not need muteing

Background noises happen. People take notes using a keyboard. People cough. If it's a few people interactively chatting, sure, leave things unmuted. In a big group call where someone's presenting, please mute however leet your audio setup is.

Well I use a an actual Shure dynamic mic and unless you get close 3 inches or so it pics up nothing - this is not you crappy laptop mic or 19.99 headset.

Interviewing sometimes involves using an unfamiliar platform, which involves things like not being sure which variant of mic icon means you're muted.

Or a pair of icons: one of which mites your microphone and the other drops you out of the audio conference completely.

For something high stakes like an interview, I'd encourage candidates to take the time to get familiar with the unfamiliar beforehand.

I agree, however not always possible

This happens a lot, and I'd recommend as a baseline having a microphone with a hard mute. My cheap Sennheiser USB headset has one; my XLR microphone is inline with a Rolls MS111 because it doesn't.

I had an in-person interview for a job a couple of years ago, and I'd turned up with my two year old son.

I later heard that the way I dealt with him helped enormously in getting a good impression of me.

(Not the first time I've taken a child to an interview; people generally seem to take it in their stride here in Finland, which is a little odd to me as a Brit.)

> the candidate demonstrates that they've had the empathy and self awareness to consider how their call setup affects others' ability to communicate with them

This, a hundred times. It your software mutes mikes when someone else is talking, you need to notice and adapt with an awkward silence to let others speak. This is good.

The most blatant example of this to me and somehow invisible to others was my previous boss. He had a lot of remote calls that he would take in the open office. Because of the isolation from his head phone, he spent six hours per day berating people, yelling in the open office. That, everyone noticed. But there generally was signal issue, lag, etc. and he would always say “There’s a problem on your side.” The assumption that the other side had to fix something, that presumption… It hurt me more than him trying to address a wifi issue by yelling louder for the following 55 minutes.

> how they handle the real world challenges of remote work

But an interview is not normal work, if I'm in a meeting with my colleagues and my kids start screaming it's ok to mute myself and tell them off, possibly drop from the call.

During an interview I could do the same but that would also stress me out a lot at a time where I'm already stressed out. I've interviewed people who freaked out because of a bad connection.

Of course, Your Candidates May Vary.

Ask an interviewer, be graceful and supportive when that happens, and affirm to the candidate that it's OK to pause the interview and then calm things down and restart.

Your mention of “uncontrollable distraction” reminds me:

When I was interviewing for my current job, my son was 4 at the time and we were both at home. About 10 minutes into the 30 minute interview he came into my office and proceeded to climb over and around my back for the remaining 20 minutes of the interview.

The fact that my interviewer handled this with total calm impressed the heck out of me, and she later relayed that my ability to continue interviewing while this was going on impressed her as well

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