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Comment by alex_lav | Hacker News Reader

> Is my only choice to yeet Adderall and "memorize my lines"?

I really cannot fathom why you jumped to this. Is "practice and get better" that unreasonable? You really only need a handful of things to talk about if the question is as open ended as "Tell us about a project you worked on". The question is akin to having a normal conversation with another dev about something you built.

Ultimately the point of the question is A.) To tell if you're lying about your experience, B.) To tell if you were conscious of things like edge cases, alternative strategies, failure conditions and scale, C.) If you can communicate effectively. I wouldn't overthink it. It doesn't have to be Google 2.0 to be the project you talk about, just something that you had a significant hand in making and were aware of any tradeoffs available.

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i’m always surprised the first thing people think is that other people are lying, and than if they cannot answer a question right on the spot they must be lying.

there must be some name for this in the domain of human behaviour or psychology.

people are not aware of the fact that if they go into an interview with that assumption there is a probability that they will think somebody is lying when they are not. this is a real problem when hiring people.

> i’m always surprised the first thing people think is that other people are lying, and than if they cannot answer a question right on the spot they must be lying

Where did anyone suggest this is what was happening?

> Ultimately the point of the question is A.) To tell if you're lying about your experience

You’re the one who suggested the idea, that the question is a way to tell if a candidate is lying about their experience.

Right, among other things and not “on the spot”. And I would argue that being unable to communicate about your experience is, to an interviewer, pretty similar to lying as they’re just a candidate making unverifiable claims.

Many people lie about their experience. Usually it’s glaringly obvious.

your answer makes it clear that you must not have built anything yourself of substantial size or complexity. if you worked on something for 10-15 years chances are you cannot answer some random specific question about that project because you haven’t worked on that particular part of the code base recently. so that does not mean you are lying about having built the thing.

my point is that assuming everyone is lying, biases you to the extent you want the outcome to be that the person is lying such that you can pat yourself on the back for a good job done rather than coming to the awkward conclusion you were wrong. and that is a real problem in interviewing because it means you discard top candidates.

> your answer makes it clear that you must not have built anything yourself of substantial size or complexity.

lol

> if you worked on something for 10-15 years chances are you cannot answer some random specific question

Again, the "random specific question" we're discussing is "Tell me about a project you worked on." So, again, if you can't answer "Tell me about a project you worked on", if you're claiming to have worked on that project for 10-15 years...I suspect there's something larger at play than just an inability to communicate about one's experience.

> so that does not mean you are lying about having built the thing.

I can and do routinely answer these types of questions about my work without issue. So nope.

> my point is that assuming everyone is lying,

Is verifying that someone isn't lying the same as assuming they are? (Hint: no).

> and that is a real problem in interviewing because it means you discard top candidates.

I would guess fewer than .1% of "top candidates" fail interviews at the "Tell me about a project you worked on" stage.

"Tell me about a project you worked on." is not a specific question

"why did you choose to order the members of this struct in your C code the way you did" is one.

> "Tell me about a project you worked on." is not a specific question

Exactly. That's the point.

> "why did you choose to order the members of this struct in your C code the way you did" is one.

Neat!

I'll leave this chain now. This does not seem productive.

Good. Take this as an opportunity to treat people you don’t know more fairly and don’t assume everyone is a liar.

Lol

People think that other people are lying, because .. they extremely often do. Do you know how many people apply for engineering jobs and can't solve fizzbuzz? What's the alternative? Just trust anything people say and blindly give people any job they apply for because they say they have the qualifications?

The specific question helps settle the lying issue. If somebody claims to have experience, they should be able to produce an example of said experience. It's both an immediate test of their experience as well as at the same time providing lots of additional data, through their story, about how good of an engineer they might be.

Even if it's a person who has horrible communication skills, a decent interviewer can ask follow up questions to probe into the story's details that the poor communications skills left out.

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