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Comment by alan_cx | Hacker News Reader

I would immediately thank the interviewer(s) for his or her time, offer to shake hands and leave.

My reasoning is that if they want to manipulate me in an interview, chances are they would spend too much time manipulating me in my work. I respond far better to direct, honest questions. Ask me honestly and I reward that with the truth. I would tell them this if they asked. They would have their answer, and I would have demonstrated its truth.

Is that a manipulation in its self?

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I totally agree. He even admits as such that this is the purpose of the question:

  "Instead the question ... taps something deeper and more
  closely held.  ... If I know what matters to them, I can
  right away tell if the same things matter to ...
  the organization at large."

In other words: "expose something tender and honest, so that we can exploit it as directly as possible."

I really don't see how this is manipulative, who exactly are they trying to fool? The "tapping into something deeper" isn't some tricksy ploy to reveal more than you want, it just means the question is crafted to address several layers of discussion about what you're looking for, all at once.

Unless you're trying to dig into their compensation priorities so you can lowball them in the right areas, this is just a question aimed at seeing how well they'd fit in to the company in terms of their own career/strategic goals, working environment, QA/testing standards, etc. I'd rather get those things out there in the interview and find out "Oh, yeah we have source control, and staging/dev servers, but I'd say our devs push about half their code changes straight to production via scp right off of their workstations. Saves time that way.", rather than on my second week when I've made X number of changes and commitments in my lifestyle & career for this job.

Well, actually, that's the whole point of the people side of an interview: to understand the human on the other side of the table

It's not exactly exploiting. It's ensuring goal alignment and team alignment.

It's better for everyone if misaligned people don't work together.

> My reasoning is that if they want to manipulate me in an interview, chances are they would spend too much time manipulating me in my work.

What is manipulative about the question? The poster mentions trying to get interviewees to talk about things, or to think in ways, that they wouldn't normally. I suppose that's manipulative, but I wouldn't think of it as deceptive in the way that your comment seems to me to imply.

The manipulation is that the questioner is asking a question to get an answer which will be used to answer an unasked question, when asking the actual question would be easier and open. (Hope that makes sense)

Its like asking what your favourite colour is and implying life style from it. Fine if you are doing a medical psychological test, because the patient doctor trust exists, but, IMHO, not fine for a mere job interview. OK, the CIA or MI5 can play at that, but not a bog standard IT job.

(Just so you understand where I am coming from; this sort of psychological manipulation is an interest of mine, from advertising to political speech to NLP parlour tricks. So I will happily accept accusations of over sensitivity to this and an exaggerated position. I accept my argument is extreme)

I can certainly see your point, but the article seemed to me to be describing the manipulation done by a psychologist, not a con artist; that is, the interviewer is trying to simulate a natural conversational environment to allow the interviewee to speak freely, not trying to trick the interviewee into revealing something he or she wants to keep secret. (EDIT: As Gnolfo said better about 6 hours ago. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3726756)

I guess that my reaction is motivated by not understanding what the actual, unasked question is. It seems to me that the interviewer is asking pretty much what he or she wants to know. Would the question be more palatable if it came with more of a preface about how the response would be interpreted?

P.S. Rather than asking about favourite colours, one may ask about fish. http://www.netfunny.com/rhf/jokes/87/7950.html

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