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Comment by BossingAround | Hacker News Reader

I recently interviewed with a company, and the interviewer asked me "how do you organize data." I wasn't sure if they wanted to talk about classes, modules, databases, k-v stores, hashing data and routing distributed requests to the same pods. I asked, and they answered "I mean in general, how do you organize data."

After talking for a bit about pretty much all of the above, the interviewer asked "have you used dictionaries?"

The reason I'm telling the story is, if a lot of your candidates fail to answer your questions, the problem might be in the question.

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I would have halted for a moment and asked something like: organize data for what purpose? At which point I would expect there to be some amount of clarification. As it sounds to me like they're talking about organizing some set of data for lookup, as opposed to organizing data around how it flows through an application, for example

I often find when you are given questions like that no matter how you probe you get a really defensive interviewer who doesn’t want to give away the answer they are expecting. I’ve been in very similar situations with vague questions and I’ve tried to probe for more details and just been met with defensiveness with an attitude that says they expect me to know exactly what they mean

It is worse: your attempt to clarify the question may be regarded by some interviewers as a sign you are not senior dev (they think [erroneously in my opinion] that "senior" means that you must figure out fine details yourself).

This seems odd to me, though its entirely possible my experience thus far hasn't been this. I've been told at the last 3 places I worked that one of the reasons I was hired was how inquisitive I was during the interview stage, asking lots of questions before coming up with solutions

I am most definitely not ruling out what you're saying may be common case and I am just very lucky, but I do want to act as a sort of counter point to see if others can weigh in so we can get more of an industry sense around this

Anecdatum: my experience has been the same as others - asking questions about the interview questions generally leads to a bad outcome. In 25 years, I reckon it's less than a handful of times where asking questions of the interviewers has actually got a positive response.

Hell, even when in jobs, asking questions about projects I'm assigned has sometimes got a negative response...

Seems weird to me that asking a specific question about what it is you're trying to achieve would be negative. Especially since most interviews often open with feel free to ask clarifying questions or something along those lines.

If the prompt is unclear its worth getting clarity, just like if something is unclear in the job you seek clarity, I feel like people not asking questions would be a big red flag.

of course, asking too many (this is subjective but I think we can all think of a reasonable situation where there were too many questions being asked relative to their value) could be a red flag

> just like if something is unclear in the job you seek clarity

There are a distressing number of managers / leads I have encountered who consider that if you're asking for clarity, you're impugning their powers of explanation because CLEARLY they explained it well enough (after all, they understand it!) and you're either an idiot or being sarcastic to undermine them.

Could it be because the clarification questions are perceived as not understanding? Would it help if one prefaced with something like "Well, there's many different ways like X, Y and Z and the best one depends on the details of the requirements. Did you have something specific in mind and if so what are those requirements?"

By mentioning a few ways you'd show you're aware of various solutions, and you'd also provide context for why you're asking probing questions.

Then again, I haven't interviewed in quite a while (love my current job) so...

> Could it be because the clarification questions are perceived as not understanding?

Sure but taking that as "the asker is an idiot" rather than "I may not have explained this well" is all too common (I know I've been guilty of this more than a handful of times.)

> Would it help if one prefaced with something like [...]

I think if you're having to carefully phrase your (reasonable, obvs.) questions in order to avoid upsetting the interviewer, that's a bit of a red flag, no?

When I interviewed for software development, I used to have a very open-ended question about optimizing a system I would describe, and there was no right answer, there were tons of directions to go in, and the point was to get the interviewee to ask questions so I could figure out if they'd been around the block and which blocks they had been around.

Why would you only want cookie-cutter "correct" answers to your questions? That doesn't tell you shit about the candidate?

One a rare occasion I actually got feedback after the interview (it was for a startup), It was because I asked 'too many questions' it was decided that I'd need way more mentoring than they can afford for the senior position I was applying for.

That's infuriating. There's a clear distinction between asking "how do I do this thing?" and "what do you want me to do?"

I can't read your mind, and that goes both for interview questions and determining product needs.

> After talking for a bit about pretty much all of the above, the interviewer asked "have you used dictionaries?"

Hahaha classic.

I was once in an interview (which I failed) and was asked a problem related to some sort of monotonic queue. I wrote the solution and was going through it, when the interviewer asked: 'what CS concept are you using in this solution'? I didn't really understand what he was asking for and in turn I asked for more clarification like 'Are you referring to the data structures I used? Or the technique (it was some sort of greedy)?' 'no'. After a couple of back-and-forth questions and answers, he finally tells me he was looking for me to say 'a state machine'. Seriously?

"I was once in an interview (which I failed)"

You didn't fail that interview. They did.

I have had that exact experience before. It is fine, you realise the company is toasted and you move on (the place that asked me this had just got rinsed by an offshore consulting firm, ecomm site built with a graph database, comedic stuff).

There are plenty of different types of dictionaries, organizing their data differently.

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