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Comment by victorbojica | Hacker News Reader

I was also part of this sort of interview once. They specifically asked personal questions - parents stuff, relationship, etc. Definitely not work related. It was indeed a very strange and exhausting experience. I could've definetly refused to answer some of the questions or drop out of the interview altogether, but not sure why I haven't.

So yeah, this type of interview exists so I highly doubt the interviewer interviewing OP was asking about work stuff...

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> They specifically asked personal questions - parents stuff, relationship, etc.

In the US any employer who asks you about personal relationships during an interview is opening themselves up to an illegal discrimination lawsuit.

Which protected characteristic does "personal relationships" fall under? It's vague enough to mean almost anything you want it to be, and I struggle to imagine any sort of successful prosecution.

Discrimination of sexual orientation, for example, depending on how it's asked. Just one of those areas best left alone in an interview

There’s a reason interviewers in the US won’t (or shouldn’t) even ask if the candidate has a spouse. If they ask something about that specifically, and the answer indicates some kind of protected status (a man says “my husband” or reveal which place of worship they got married in) and they then decline the candidate, the candidate could make the claim they were denied because they’re gay or practice whatever religion or something else.

Asking personal questions could be seen as a way to elicit information about a protected status and thus give a rejected candidate ammunition for a claim, whether warranted or not.

It’s best to just keep questions focused on the workplace.

I think people vastly overstate the amount of actual risk companies are taking when they engage is possibly illegal behavior, especially on this forum.

Having been on the sidelines for spurious claims of this nature, these sorts of lawsuits are a huge risk: the cost of mounting a defense can easily bankrupt a small business, even if the claims turn out to be baseless.

Even in the case of complete innocence, it often becomes a he-said-she-said situation, and the outcome boils down to which side presents the best set of “facts”.

I use quotes there because my broader experience with the court system routinely shows that it does not need be burdened by the “truth” or “facts”. That is probably because the regular cast in those venues are literally trained and practiced liars.

I think it also depends on how big of a company. If someone (say perhaps, GP) mostly has experience in smaller companies, they might not have had the law of large numbers bring the lawsuit cudgel to bear on their company before.

But if you're at a large enough company, you're absolutely getting sued for this from time to time, so you'll have the "how to not get sued" training before you're allowed to interview.

(Edit: this isn't limited to interviews. There's many, many examples of things that large companies will not touch due to legal risk, that smaller companies will... either due to lack of knowledge on the legal risk (maybe no legal department even exists yet?) or intentionally as a gamble)

Likely true, and I’m sure many companies go unpunished despite engaging in it, but that doesn’t make it a good idea, and probably the kind of thing that could ruin a small business if they did get caught up in it.

Never ever prompt someone to discuss personal relationships in an interview. The moment the conversation drifts into religion, family status, child count, sexuality or gender makeup, or any number of other things, you can easily run afoul of state or federal laws, or open yourself to discrimination lawsuits.

Women in a committed relationship can enter a medical situation that renders then unable to work for 6-9 months, + 2 - 3 years of leave afterwards. Men don't, that's just a month or two twice.

It is illegal, and in my book also immoral to deny such a candidate, but the other side of the coin is there.

Employer fishing to see if the person is married, which will require additional dependents on health insurance. Married is possibly more likely to have kids and take more time off for them or maternity/paternity leave.

Even just an IQ test [1] or teacher licensing test [2,3] opens them to illegal discrimination, so that's not saying much.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griggs_v._Duke_Power_Co.

[2] https://www.wsj.com/us-news/education/black-latino-teachers-...

[3] https://teachercertification.com/nystce/multi-subject-arts-a...

Working in selection, I can say it’s more nuanced than that. Any measurement can be used as long as it is relevant to the business and related to performance. For example, you’re fine to reject people based on height if you’re hiring basketball players and being higher predicts scoring more points. Or even reject people based on gender (or other protected classes) if you can demonstrate that that specific group is absolutely necessary for you e.g. you want a counselor working with sexual trauma survivors and have evidence that matching patients to counselor on gender gives meaningfully better results for said patients.

The specific cases you mention and the finer point is how do you demonstrate the necessity of a measure? Is high general IQ absolutely necessary for SWEs? Or is it enough to have a high logical reasoning, but don’t need spatial? Do you really need high IQ or is it enough to have a lot of practical experience with hands on skills? Do you need higher IQ to do zero to one development vs code maintenance? The devil’s always in the details with these kinds of questions, and it’s definitely not a blanket “you can’t use anything”.

Yeah if you're willing to go into a decade-long court fight then maybe they'll allow you to use a test (where the burden of proof is on the employer to show the test is necessary, i.e. guilty until proven innocent). Or maybe you'll be liable for millions of dollars in compensation. And even something as seemingly reasonable as an IQ test for a knowledge work position is illegal.

No it isn't. This Griggs v Duke Power meme is an internet myth. Practically every white collar job can use IQ tests to qualify applicants, and a few very large companies do exactly this.

You call it a myth yet it was a real case, with that real conclusion, and the subsequent case of New York having to pay for daring to require a teacher licensing test was also real. You can't just dismiss real examples by calling it a "myth". You also omit that "very large companies" almost universally have DEI departments and affirmative action policies to shield themselves [1]. And it is still the opinion of law professors that such tests are legally risky [2]:

Under the Civil Rights Act of 1964, using IQ tests could violate the law if the tests are shown to have a disproportionate impact on racial minorities or women, and are not job-related, New York University School of Law Professor Samuel Estreicher told The Post.

Estreicher added that the use of IQ and Myers-Briggs tests also risks violating the Americans with Disabilities Act, which bars companies from requiring applicants to take mental or physical examinations prior to offering them jobs.

“To avoid legal risk, companies shouldn’t rely on these tests,” Estreicher said. “They should just be talking to job applicants.”

Lydia Brown, a policy counsel at advocacy group the Center for Democracy and Technology, said trying to quanitfy an applicant’s intelligence is a ” rather slippery concept.”

“Employers need to really carefully consider whether their test is actually measuring a quality or trait that is necessary to perform the job — and that’s a legal standard,” Brown told The Post.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2023-black-lives-matter-e...

[2] https://nypost.com/2022/03/15/silicon-valley-firm-apologizes...

Key element of your quote: “if the tests [...] are not job-related”

There’s nothing magic about IQ tests. Any hiring criteria that isn’t sufficiently linked (the threshold here has always been low, and the trend has been to lower it further) and is also shown to have an uneven impact by protected class is a problem.

And now we're pretending to not understand chilling effects. And again ignoring how New York had to pay for asking teaching-related questions to prospective teachers.

The (well-known) companies that sell general cognitive testing services for employment applications have logo crawls that include household names with deep pockets. It's an internet myth.

The reason general cognitive IQ testing isn't more commonly used in employment settings is that it doesn't work very well.

IQ testing in white collar US employment is not unlawful and several household name companies openly perform general cognitive assessments; the companies that provide those tests have logo crawls just like every other product company. Griggs doesn't say what you think it says.

IQ testing is uncommon in US employment because it doesn't do a good job of selecting candidates, not because it's unlawful.

I once had an interviewer ask me, several years back, about the religious affiliations of my college.

It's supposed to mean "at work," but that doesn't at all mean that you can assume the interviewer is going to understand that.

Legally, asking personal questions in an interview that are unrelated to the job is a huge minefield, ie, you could be opening the company to discrimination lawsuits. Huge red flag that the company isn't very professional.

The minefield is enormous but there are only like five or six mines in it and they're all really well marked. It's something adults navigate every day.

I don't actually care about personal details, I'm just looking for a topic you can use to explain your point of view for a few minutes.

Besides the point about separating personal and work life, there's the aspect of having the self-respect to maintain your own privacy.

You wouldn't answer deep personal questions from a random stranger on the street. Some questions might've been too invasive to answer were even some family and friends to ask them. Yet, it seems they felt like they should answer some interviewer they just met.

It's ultimately the responsibility of the person answering to select what and how much of themselves to share, depending on the relationship.

If the interviewer were to ask, "tell me your most embarrassing moment you had while having sex with someone", you wouldn't answer that. If they asked "tell me about the hardest day of your life" and the real, real answer was somehow that time you had that embarrassing moment while having sex with someone, you still wouldn't answer that. You would answer with what you'd be comfortable sharing with the random interviewer, if anything, else you can just decline the question.

The "embarrassing sex" is an exaggerated example. You can set your limits differently, in order to not feel

> completely emotionally drained

as the OP put it. Setting your limits such that your personal life is outside of what your comfortable sharing with the random interviewer would be appropriate.

GP comment on separating personal and work life said to imagine they tacked "... at work" at the end. You can also imagine "... that you're comfortable with sharing" as a more general rule.

Doesn’t that open them to discrimination lawsuits?

If they’re specifically asking about personal things like that then those are very inappropriate interview questions.

Rejecting the question is actually how you pass. Open with "I leave everything private at home when at work hence my answer for the work position is: [here the answer but scoped and formulated to your work life and NOT to your private life]".

You don't want to pass an interview like that.

Its an effective way to sort out those candidates who are not able to leave private stuff at home.

Also a great way for candidates to filter out employers who play bizarre mind games and think personal trick questions are appropriate in an interview.

Literally he’s saying to behave inappropriately in a professional interview and see if the candidate plays along. Might as well see if you can get the candidate to offer a bribe or sexual favors for the job since we’re going all in on entrapment.

The opposite. Are you breaking the rule to leave your private stuff home just because the other side is or are you capable of keeping out of such sources of interpersonal conflicts, take over and redirect the discussion back to a professional level?

Of course it depends for what field and role you apply. For any leading role or customer contact point the capability to stay professional is essential. If you flip burgers at McDonald's then it's your right to be grumpy.

You are literally saying it’s a good idea to attempt to entrap potential employees by intentionally behaving the way you want them to not. It’s like pouring margaritas for you and the interviewee and then after they take a sip you say you don’t hire people who drink on the job.

This is unethical and it’s also a shitty filter because they people you want to hire (the ones why won’t talk personal stuff at work; or won’t drink on the job) are likely to write you off because they also don’t want to work with the guy who wants to drink margaritas and chat personal trauma at work.

I am literally saying that the role the person applied to was for a "founding engineer at a mental health startup".

This is a leading role(!) in the mental health(!!) industry. That should give some clues. They also announced that the follow-up interview as a "non traditional - a ~90 minute culture fit chat" dropping more hints.

Unfortunately he also "fail to recall the exact wording of the discussion topics".

I bet the exact wording was open enough to leave enough room to not "felt completely emotionally drained" afterwards.

I think the interviewer did him a favor. He is just not able to handle a leading role in the mental health industry in a way that would have been mental healthy for him.

It’s absolutely not. Putting people in a vulnerable position and then pressing them for information you don’t need and should not ask for is a good way to demonstrate that you are an unethical or at best incompetent interviewer.

It might be a good way filter for candidates that have a high tolerance for being mistreated, though, if that’s the goal.

If an interviewer, who has the power to deny you a job unless your answers are satisfactory to them, is unprofessional enough to abuse that by pressing you for inappropriate personal details during the interview, then there actually is no correct answer.

You can't assume that person is going to act in good faith about anything else in that situation, so even refusing to take the bait is still ultimately a roulette wheel that can just as easily be labeled as "difficult" or "combative."

If it would be unprofessional to bring those things up freely, then it's actually more unprofessional to coerce people about them as a screening criteria -- whether that's coercing them into putting on a show of dancing around the issues, or coercing them into giving you honest answers.

Rejecting the company that attempts to put you through this kind of interview is how you pass.

Remember that interviews are 2-way. You don’t have to engage in someone’s bad faith or incompetent interviewing.

At that point, I think I would have just started making things up or telling stories from other people I knew. Some random interviewer has literally no right to be asking me personal questions so I have no problem improvising some fun answers for them.

my father was a turd miner in virginia and his father was a goat ball licker (c) Stephen Colbert

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