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Comment by cryptoz | Hacker News Reader

That's exactly the point. The ideal candidate presumably has a number of ideas ready to go - the question is very similar to other interview questions and you should already be preparing to talk about your hobbies and interests. The question ensures the candidate can think quickly, pick a topic they know about, and talk about it coherently. If you can't do that, you're probably not a good fit for the team. Therefore, the question is an excellent interview question: it identifies those people who are very passionate about <something>, who are organized enough to explain it on the spot and who can interact well while teaching.

Now, to the point about you: you should practice this. Being good at talking about your hobbies and interests in technical detail while explaining clearly is an extremely valuable skill. Learn it.

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When this topic comes up I always marvel at the _intellectual_ shortcuts people take to justify the _practical_ shortcuts they take to simplify the hiring process.

Working with someone is the only way to evaluate what it will be like to work with someone. Looking at their work is the only way to evaluate their work. Tautology is your friend in the hiring process. There is no royal road to hiring great people.

With regard to "you should be prepared to talk about your hobbies and interests" - Great people are (almost by definition) not interested in the particulars of your interview process. In fact, if they actually are great people you'll be courting them, not the other way around, and they'll be bringing their own ideas to the table instead of sweating over whether they're conforming to your preconceptions.

I dunno. What if my non-professional hobbies are controversial, or simply derided? I see no reason prospective employers should know that I'm a socialist or enjoy anime conventions, and many of them would almost certainly disapprove of one of those two.

Edit: I think I hold exclusively controversial hobbies / books / opinions. I would love this question so much if I ever saw it in an interview. Controversial topics seem to be perfectly suited to this question.

Original:

The point of an interview is two-fold: the company is looking to find a good match for an open position, and the candidate is looking for work. Neither of you wants to enter an agreement that will turn sour.

It is a reasonable position that if you have no interests, or hobbies, or any read books at all that you are comfortable talking about with your employer, that you are likely a poor fit for the company. The topic does not have to be non-professional, either. Pick something that relates to the job if you must.

Isn't about half the world's population somewhat socialist? Or fans of anime? Those two examples you picked are, in my opinion, absolutely ideal topics to answer this question with. Why would you be so afraid to talk about them?

This is a tangent, but there are several segues you can use to get from anime to a generic technical discussion. Here are my examples:

- I wrote a scraper for MyAnimeList.net to an sqlite3 db in order to build a mobile website.

- I wrote a shell script that i keep a copy of in each folder for each anime series i watch. When the script runs, it parses its own name as a number and adds one, so that i can easily keep track of what episode i'm up to.

I'm sure there are ways to turn almost any controversial hobby into something technical and demonstrable. Even if it's not something that you've built directly - Do you use the MAL Updater? Have you tried out Vocaloid? Using a really interesting playback method (hi10p, lavf, madvr, ...)? You could explain how they work.

Ah, but the thing is: I don't have any technical projects related to anime. I currently have two technical projects on slow burn, but neither is anime-related.

One of them is a research project, so I can always talk about that at the risk of coming across as single-minded.

The other is a bit of software I'd like to turn into an on-the-side lifestyle business.

From what I understand, Jason Garrett-Glaser (DarkShikari) got interested in video encoding through the anime scene. He's now the lead developer on X264.

Absolutely (although you'll get told off for spelling x264 with a capital X). The `--tune touhou` option is a big giveaway - fascinating to see how an anime-subculture game had such a profound effect, but it's obviously a useful test case for the encoder.

My other favourite example in the same vein is Avery Lee of Virtualdub fame (with EA, last i heard?). He maintains some fantastic software and an enthralling blog, and it all comes back to Sailor Moon.

> hobbies are controversial, or simply derided

I think that answers your question.

Look, you're asking someone to walk into an interview, with people they do not know, and lay out a portion of their personal life for examination, without any idea of how that information may be used against them. That's pretty unfairly tilted in favor of the company.

I, for one, do not discuss my private life in depth in interviews - it's not the company's or the interviewers business to know that, beyond certain legal issues.

I may choose to discuss at some point in the future when I better know the person to whom I speak, but until then, it's strictly a professional relationship.

> That's pretty unfairly tilted in favor of the company.

You seem to be assuming that the company's goal is to find a reason to reject someone. That's not correct.

If anything, it's tilted in favor of candidates that have the same hobbies as interviewers.

Which is still unfair.

No, my assumption is that a potential employer has no right to know anything about me outside of professional qualifications or what may raise legal issues (convictions, credit rating [iffy], or conflicts of interest). My personal life is strictly off-limits until I get to know them.

Look, I know it sounds confrontational, and I don't go into interviews expecting a hostile environment. But I also don't go into interviews expecting to speak of anything other than things directly related to the business.

I would be very uncomfortable if asked to speak about anything not directly related to the business or business environment there.

Personality is certainly a legal deciding factor in hiring someone for a position in a company, especially in at-will employment states.

It is illegal for a company to not hire on undue reasons such as race, religion, political affiliations, etc., but you are entering into an employment relationship, and it is not unfair to understand more about the person you are paying to work with.

The entire United States is at-will employment. Some states forbid "union shops", but nowhere in the USA will you receive a permanent contract like you would in Europe that stipulates you cannot be fired without reason.

I'd actually speak comfortably about such things, provided the interviewer first shows that they are a good-natured and tolerant person working in an office environment where diverse views and interests are welcome. I as a socialist have no objection to working with one anarcho-capitalist, only to working with an entire company culture that assumes anarcho-capitalism to be The Right Answer. I likewise have no problem with someone who thinks anime is boring (90% of it is crap, after all), only with an entire company culture in which having "geeky" interests other than programming is viewed as childish, immature, or unprofessional.

(After all, I think that leaving work at 6:30PM to go to a Haskell Users' Meetup at 7:00PM where you will drink sugary, caffeinated soda and/or beer, eat bad pizza from a corporate chain, and watch an hour-and-a-half presentation on a programming and theorem-proving suite that is perpetually unready for use on machines with less than 8GB of RAM is downright insanely messianic language fanboyism. That doesn't mean I didn't go right along and watch the presentation to be sociable about it and to give everyone their time to make their case. Hell, it doesn't mean I didn't have a good time, even if I left after my coworker's presentation because I didn't want to stay until 10:00PM to watch a theorem-proving presentation I couldn't understand.)

A large part of interviewing is gut feeling about someone. If you think their personal life has a number of trite aspects, it's not going to do wonders for their chances.

I mean this question honestly: are you American? Because back in the States, mentioning that I'm a socialist would bring the reply, "So why are you working in private industry instead of for the government? Are you here to infiltrate our business?", and things of that nature. At that point I'm not explaining anything, I'm in a debate over whether left-wingers are violating our own principles by ever working in a private, capitalist business (the proper answer is, of course we are, but nobody living under capitalism can actually boycott all capitalist enterprises and remain alive day-to-day). At that point, I've failed the interview by dragging myself off-topic and into an argument.

Point is, yes, outside the US, and to a lesser extent the rest of the Anglosphere, approximately half the world has some kind of left-wing views. Probably as many people have a hobby someone might embarrass them about. It's just not very common in polite company, in most cultures (where I live now it's downright common), to bring up this kind of out-of-work stuff as part of a job interview.

As to the anime, I once mentioned in a daily SCRUM meeting that I wanted to get done a meeting with my team leader before 5:30 because I wanted to get to an anime club at 6PM. A senior colleague, who I really do like and admire most of the time, said that Rule 1 of Anime Club is never to talk about Anime Club. This man was a professional software engineer, working in a software company, who had himself sold bootlegged imported anime back in the '90s as a side gig, and here he was engaging in geek-shaming.

That was one of the many things which made me feel deeply, deeply uncomfortable in that workplace, the other one being the fact that many people there openly and enthusiastically brought up their right-wing libertarian views (without my prompting, this was between other person 1 and other person 2) during work hours.

Overall, the various little details I hadn't detected at the interview eventually added up to a gestalt feeling that the place had the company culture of a particularly right-wing frat-house. I didn't last long there before leaving... on good terms with everyone, but feeling uncomfortable and ashamed nonetheless of leaving a job too early-in.

Hmm.... which means that for small companies like that one, you've actually got a very good point. If I bring up something controversial or unusual and the interviewer can't accept that I have views and hobbies outside work which he/she deliberately asked to hear about (provided I don't go into some boring technical lecture on an obscure topic in Computer Science I like or a physics discovery I don't actually understand nearly as well as I think I do), then it's almost definitely not a good match of a place to work for me. The model just breaks down when we're talking about large companies, or places that have a lot of good going for them outside their company culture.

>here he was engaging in geek-shaming.

No, he was making a joke about Fight Club. But if you are determined to feel persecuted, I'm sure you can find a way. The anime club at my workplace meets weekly in a conference room to use one of our projectors. Several coworkers have figurines or wallscrolls in their offices. And yes, this is in America.

Hi. I did recognize the joke about Fight Club at the time. But please do trust me, the tone and context made it a mild form of geek-shaming. His effective statement was, "Yeah, I liked that stuff too when I was a kid."

Further instances included people, starting with the same man, explicitly stating that they preferred the X-Box 360 to the Nintendo Wii because the Wii is childish. This was around the time "Elder Scrolls: Skyrim" came out, so there was a bit of a buzz about the new game release. I had mentioned being excited for the new "Legend of Zelda" game, which was contemporaneous.

I wasn't "determined to feel persecuted". Remember, if I had felt persecuted when interviewing, I would never have taken the job. I had really been excited for that job, actually.

I had never expected my coworkers to share my out-of-work hobbies, but I had expected that if the topic came up in casual conversation, I wouldn't be labeled childish or immature for what I like doing outside of work (particularly since I was, at that time, the youngest person in the office... but still old enough to be a college graduate who can legally drink working a salaried job and living independently).

A poster further down has mentioned "My Little Pony" (which, thank God, I didn't even know about back when I worked at this office). It's another fairly good example. If you ever reveal to most people that you enjoy that show, they will say to your face that you're some kind of manchild JD Salinger character, or someone with severe gender identity issues.

Which brings us right back to the issue that you should not be talking about this stuff in a job interview unless the interviewer has actually established that they are a good-natured and tolerant person who cares more about how you answer than what you answer. And I would hold that the same standard should apply to being a far-right Tea Party member, or having a cockfighting hobby.

That sounds reasonable. But I wonder if it's always true that you can't label anyone? What if someone mentioned that they spent all weekend doing a <super childish activity> :) Would you not label them as childish? (I'm not saying anime is childish)

More to the point, I think it's fine to express disinterest or even dislike other peoples hobbies etc, as long as it's done in a non-hurtful way. I don't think that's labeling people. It's just finding common ground. It's a way to stop people from going on about things you know you have zero interest in hearing about.

There's friendly environments, and there's professional environments. You can label freely in a friendly environment, but you have to actually get to know someone socially to create that. You don't label in a professional environment.

When someone asks you to talk about a hobby or book that you feel passionately about, it's probably wise to stay away from politics and religion.

Although I think it would be a great near miss to find out I was going to suffer religious/political persecution before accepting a job.

My interview at that workplace included no questions about politics or religion. However much they may later have made me feel uncomfortable in their company culture, they were experts at their craft and consummate professionals.

> Why would you be so afraid to talk about them?

Presumably because you want the job. You wouldn't want to talk about them for the same reasons you wouldn't bring up religion or politics or any other hotly contested subject.

I like Anime, I watch My Little Pony, but I wouldn't bring either up in an interview. Why? Because I know what most of the rest of the world thinks of me with just those two statements. I have MLP shirts, my wife knows people that said 'If I saw a grown man walking around with one of them on I would take my children somewhere away from that pedophile.' That is basically verbatim, with no exaggeration. I am not ashamed of my interests, but I am not mentioning them in an interview.

Of course, I'm also not looking for a job to stand in for a social club either. The only 'fit' I am interested in is can I do the job and are my co-workers not idiots.

My Little Pony was going to be the next item on my list after "anime", actually. It's exactly the kind of completely harmless thing with nasty social stigma I was thinking about.

> It is a reasonable position that if you have no interests, or hobbies, or any read books at all that you are comfortable talking about with your employer, that you are likely a poor fit for the company.

Really? I dunno--I always saw employment as more of a business transaction, and I don't give a damn about the personal lives of those I do business with.

That's extreme. You spend over half your life at work. It is personal. The most popular employers make an effort to contribute to employee's personal lives.

> You spend over half your life at work

Well, that depends. 40 hours a week out of 168 is less than 1/4, but it's certainly true that you spend at least half of your weekday, waking life at work. But more pertinently, it should be time that's set aside for work. I don't know why what we do outside of work should even be a factor, or why I should have to share the cultural values of my coworkers. It comes dangerously close to discrimination.

"Really? I dunno--I always saw employment as more of a business transaction, and I don't give a damn about the personal lives of those I do business with"

Well, I think communication is affected by personality "type". So people more "similar" communicate more effectively. If someone is not comfortable talking about anything except work, that says a lot about that person. If what it says is good or bad is another question, but to me it sounds like a boring human being ;)

I was asked what my hobbies were when interviewing for a job. I replied that I was currently working through reading books that had banned for various reasons. When asked what that last book I read, I replied "Atlas Shrugged", and explained the premise, story, and conclusions of Ayn Rand.

The interviewer hated Ayn Rand but still hired me.

Explaining and articulating why you are a socialist and the conclusions that lead you to the view is exactly the purpose of the question.

It took me about a decade to realize this, but it's a lot more fun to work for companies where your quirky hobbies fit in, rather than companies where they would look down on you because you think that casual fridays mean "sexy pichaku".

> and you should already be preparing to talk about your hobbies and interests

What!? How is that in the slightest bit relevant?

I suppose it depends on the person and on the job. For me, I list my hobbies and interests on my resume. So it's clearly relevant, as the interviewer has a copy of my resume and I had better be prepared to talk about what I wrote. For my job, my hobbies have always been relevant. I've been through about 15-20 interviews in my life so far and my hobbies have been a topic at every single interview. It's tough for me to imagine a job where these topics aren't relevant.

I appreciate that this may not be universally true, but for me it's mission critical.

Funny, I put my hobbies on my resume and nobody has ever asked about them.

OK, if you're applying for programming jobs and programming is also your hobby, then you have a point. I put my programming hobby projects on my resume too. But that's it.

If my hobby is playing bass in a death metal band, or volunteering for the LGBT community, or racing motorcycles, or political activism, it's hard to see how that's relevant at all. All I accomplish by putting that crap on my resume or talking about it in an interview is giving a prospective employer an opportunity to discriminate against me based on irrelevant crap[1]. Because believe it or not, if someone has diametrically opposing interests but they're willing to be professional about it, I'm willing to be professional about it too.

[1] Admittedly, if you're applying to work in a music store, or for a LGBT nonprofit, or a motorcycle shop, or a political campaign, those hobbies become relevant, and your programming hobby becomes irrelevant.

Depends on your industry. It's usually quite relevant in the video game industry, for example (and usually for the wrong reasons, but it always makes for some interesting interview discussions...).

I assure you I can ably speak extemporaneously about anything I grok in technical detail when required, but I am speaking about the simple act of choosing which thing to talk about.

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