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Comment by HeyLaughingBoy | Hacker News Reader

You know, I was nodding my head in agreement as I read this when something occurred to me.

This all requires that the interviewer be willing to interact deeply with the candidate. Our profession has a (well deserved, I think) reputation for having a high percentage of people who really don't like interacting with others on a peer level.

Is it likely that a large part of the problem is that we have people doing interviews who really shouldn't be? I mean, if your typical response to talking to another technical person is immediately to try to one-up them, then you're going to be a really shitty interviewer. And that's exactly the personality type I see being described over and over in these anecdotes.

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> if your typical response to talking to another technical person is immediately to try to one-up them

The psychological reality behind all this is even worse.

The interviewer is not looking for new colleagues, he is looking to improve his own self-esteem and rank. The reward for rejecting a candidate is a feeling of superiority and an appearance of being irreplaceable.

The interviewer and the candidate have opposing goals, and the interviewer can randomly change the rules at any point.

Ugh, that's horrifying. I don't think I've been the interviewer and not felt the exact opposite, like "I'm desperate to have more people on the team ASAP; do we satisfice here and make it work or hold out?"

But then I've always been interviewing for my own future colleagues/boss/reports. I guess the dynamics could be different if you're in a huge company and just generically interviewing for new cogs that might get slotted anywhere.

I'm in semiconductor design not software but my goal is always "I've got way too much work, is this person good enough that after a few months of training they will be able to do some of my work so I can get more sleep?"

If the person is smarter than me even better! Instead of spending time teaching them maybe I can learn from them and get into their network so that if I ever need a job in the future they can help me out.

this is very well put, indeed both parties are set up to fail: - the interviewer has an incentive to fail the candidate, whereas the interest of the employer is to actually hire someone eventually.. - the interviewee is rated on something that has little resemblance to the actual job (difficult to succeed when you're not told what the admission criteria are...).

Not sure about English, but in my language we have a saying "The fish stinks from the head"

I can tell you, with quite substantial sample size from me directly and from people I deeply trust that every time we encountered an interview like this, we later found out that the company culture was really bad.

Those are not the kind of people you want to work with.

For clarity, is the "like this" in your comment referring to brain teaser technical one-upmanship interviews, or the less structured style that is focused on getting to know the person and having them describe in their own words the projects in their past?

I was referring to this:

> I had a similar interview with a different company last year. Three guys and me on a Zoom call with me sharing my screen trying to solve a coding problem that in no way resembled anything I have ever encountered in my 25 year career. When I got stuck they just stared at me. They would not give me any hints whatsoever. They just stared at me.

> Not sure about English, but in my language we have a saying "The fish stinks from the head"

English has this expression too, except it's "The fish rots from the head". (Which, when you think about it, makes more sense.) What's your first language?

Some years back I wrote a post about interviewing, from the point of view of the _interviewer_. I emphasised that during the interview, the candidate is the most important person in the world.

It only later dawned to me that our industry has a non-trivial fraction of people for whom empathy is a foreign concept. They're not sociopaths, because those folks can at least feign empathy - we're talking about individuals who can't see themselves in another person's situation at all. On top of that, we don't really provide actual interview training to engineers either. Out of all the people I personally know in London, only one (1) has received formal interview training.

Is it any wonder that the interview gauntlet is such an awful experience for pretty much everyone?

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