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Comment by SavantIdiot | Hacker News Reader

It amazes me how defensive, threatened, and snarky people get about interview questions.

When leading an interview, do you know how hard it is to tease out if someone is a creative thinker or just a bullshitter? Very hard. You come at it from multiple angles. Sometimes you need questions like this, it is part of the interviewing toolkit along with coding examples, and domain-specific challenges.

EDIT: And sometimes you just need to hire a drone that will follow orders and not think creatively: just implement the spec as-is. WHy? because tech needs all sorts of skills. You don't need (and can't manage) a team of Feynmans. It would be crazy, his ego was huge.

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tease out if someone is a creative thinker

While I get your point and have been in a similar position myself as the interviewer, the longer I've been working the more I think "creative" is just as much of an overloaded and under-defined term as "smart". These days I just look for the ability to think through complex things methodically, and the creative spark will show itself later, and in place of innate creativity, the ability to churn through lots of ideas when it's needed is a serviceable substitute.

And if by "creative" the interviewers (not necessarily you) mean the ability to come up with novel but compelling ideas, that's something that happens on timescales longer than an interview and certainly not under interview pressure. The people I know who are best at generating novel, compelling ideas do it on the timescales of weeks to months.

Eh, your mileage may vary, but I've normally found too completely open ended questions impossible to ever really get a good signal from. I've done enough interviews to feel like questions with a pretty binary "you either get it or you don't", evaluation make it pretty hard to judge someone. I'd rather ask questions where there are multiple levels of evaluation, rather than a single trick.

> do you know how hard it is to tease out if someone is a creative thinker or just a bullshitter?

One day, we'll look back at brainteasers for interviews like how most of us currently view phrenology today.

I thought it was a perfectly reasonable question to ask someone trying out for Microsoft's new manhole design division

So that's why Windows sucks. It was designed by people who are good at manhole design, not writing software. :-)

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