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Comment by onlyrealcuzzo | Hacker News Reader

> It gives you a chance to explore depth and breadth of their knowledge on something technical that they claim to understand.

Assuming you know enough about what they're doing to actually dig in - which, granted, maybe you're only considering interviewing people who are working things you're somewhat familiar with.

Ultimately, I don't see how this is different from a technical design interview - in that you can be susceptible to hiring charlatans, and pass on people who'd rather say they don't know something than try to BS most of it on the spot to sound impressive.

The two people could have the same knowledge. You're more likely to hire the charlatan. Maybe that's what you want :shrug:

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In my own experience interviewing people about systems they have worked on (as opposed to hypothetical on-the-spot design), we have been highly successful in routing out charlatans, as you put it. They very rapidly get hand-wavy and are only able to give the most shallow of answers. In a few cases they will go in-depth, but reveal truly bizarre decisions or lack of understanding of the platform.

Good senior engineers can usually go fairly deep, they are honest about where they don't have as much knowledge, and are usually candid about what was good and maybe what in retrospect was a hack or a bad decision in retrospect.

We've had very few false positives. It's a conversation and we understand and appreciate when people say they don't know. We understand that really good engineers say "I don't know how that works." If all of your answers are "I don't know how that works.", it'll be red flags enough for the team. The team of interviewers has a very wide and deep knowledge of technologies (it's kind of a virtuous cycle). We call it out in the pre-interview handout that if you pick something super obscure it'll hurt your chances as the team will struggle to ask good probing questions.

The nice thing about this is you're giving the candidate a choice about what they want to describe. Good engineers will choose appropriate topics.

Is this sort of interview common in the industry? This is the first time I've seen someone describe a technical interview I know I could pass with flying colors.

> Maybe that's what you want :shrug:

That just seems rude...but to the larger point, there are a lot of signals that you can pick up if you have the ability...if you have zero ability to read people and you can literally only understand if they are answering abstract technical questions correctly, you as an interviewer would probably better be replaced by a web form.

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