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Comment by Simon_O_Rourke | Hacker News Reader

How is it unethical? Say you ask whoever what's being asked and they say you need to sort a string in place and then discuss how a random forest gets trained... You still need to answer those questions AND know enough to answer the follow up questions. If you're no good you'll be still found out. It just means you'll have a head start over someone without those kinds of contacts. So what level of utilizing your professional network crosses a line? Does a recommendation cross a line because I know for a fact that internal recommendations are moved to the head of the queue in most companies.

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Presumably the value in knowing "you need to sort a string in place and then discuss how a random forest gets trained" is that it impacts your answers - for instance, by allowing you to look this up before the interview while appearing to the interviewers to he operating unfer the dame conditions as the other candidates, who did not know to. Your performance then appears as a signal of broader inwoledge and capability than you possess - you have, as is the entire point here and which I should not need to spell out, gained an advantage over other candidates by virtue of the information which was intentionally leaked.

If the point of the interview were "answer those questions AND know enough to answer the follow up questions" _once told what to expect and prep_, they’d be sharing those questions with all candidates. If you feel that saying to the interviewers "by the way, I did know this because [X] told me they’d be here" wouldn’t impact outcomes, then great. If you feel you’d need to hide that, then you’re aware this involves dishonesty - and if you still struggle to see how that’s unethical, lets just make sure we never need to work together.

> lets just make sure we never need to work together

Seeing as how you seem to prefer to let everyone else steal a march on you in interviews in the interest of "fairness", that's not likely to happen anytime soon.

This is correct—I do not engage ethics only when it won’t cost me, nor take convenience into account when determining where my lines are. Perhaps I’m privileged to have that option.

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