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Comment by Aurornis | Hacker News Reader

I’ve done a number of interviews in my career. You don’t have to be a genius to see through the candidates who play this game where they tell you a perfectly sanitized, idyllic response that they’ve calculated as the optimal phrasing that you want to hear.

A lot of applicants do it. The skill of interviewing is to get a sense of what the true situation is underneath what the candidate is saying with their words. These candidates who show up and do the “subordinate yourself to the desires of capital in all areas” schtick are plentiful. It doesn’t fool an experienced interviewer, so they’re going to be evaluating whether or not you can do the job without becoming a problem based on whatever other signals they can get. The candidate’s words are almost a no-op, other than a slight signal that they have a tendency to blow smoke instead of having real conversations.

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Then you shouldn't be asking those questions in the first place.

Why do you want a job?, Why do you want to relocate?, Why do you want to work here?, etc. are BS "no-op" questions that are not relevant to the skills that they are promoting.

If an interviewer asks these types of questions, they are literally showcasing that this part of the interview is a BS "Subordinate yourself to the desires of capital in all areas" conversation. You will predictably get the "no-op" answers you asked for.

The interviewer always sets the tone of the meeting. You can't complain when they chose to play along. If you want a real conversation, you need to make it amply clear.

"Why do you want to work here" can be insightful.

I like to be asked this because I can for one tell the truth, and then see how the interviewer responds (when this is at an advanced stage of the process, with real people)

> Then you shouldn't be asking those questions in the first place.

> Why do you want a job?, Why do you want to relocate?, Why do you want to work here?,

I never said anything about those questions or even the type of questions. Did you confuse my comment for someone else's?

The no-op answers I was talking about can come from any question, including technical ones. Some candidates will tell talk in circles for 30 minutes about the company's product and how the team did amazing things, but you can't pin them down to explaining what they did or anything that might prove they know what they're talking about.

They will change the subject at every opportunity and talk your ear off with things regurgitated from blogs, but you leave the interview feeling like you wasted 30 minutes because they were so busy dodging every question and combining words together that they thought you would like to hear.

One alternative is to skip the conversational format and go straight into coding and deep technical questions, but hey guess what? There are people who will hate you for doing that too!

> I’ve done a number of interviews in my career. You don’t have to be a genius to see through the candidates who play this game where they tell you a perfectly sanitized, idyllic response that they’ve calculated as the optimal phrasing that you want to hear.

I worked in multiple companies in my multi-decade career, including FAANG (or whatever acronym is used now). I was even an intervewer for one of those

The people that give the sanitized calculated responses are actually what employers are typically looking for. It shows the candidate is willing to do the job without causing problems by confirming as a good worker bee.

Your workplace is not somewhere for real conversations.

I suspect a lot of interviewers think it is a good thing when someone repeats those lines. That is they are not trying to get under the words.

the monkey says and does what we want it to do -- why go deeper?

Right, it's game of pretending that you sincerely desire these things. They don't want a faker, they want a true believer, and they have plenty of skillful people like you to use as tools to suss out who is and who isn't. To stick with the merchandise analogy, you must (sometimes) become like the "outlet" stores who fill their inventory with junk designed to be sold cheaply rather than marked down high end stuff. This flatters your customer into thinking they got a good deal, and is an effective way to make sales. This is an endless game of cat and mouse.

> They don't want a faker, they want a true believer

I'm trying to explain that it's easy to spot the fakers.

When you do a lot of interviews you see a lot of candidates who follow the advice above. Unless it's your first month of doing interviews, it's really easy to see right through.

The candidates never think they're coming off as fake, though.

Really skilled interviewers can bait these candidates into telling little half-truths and inconsistencies that reveal their game.

You're explaining that you think you do a good job of spotting the fakers. How would you know if you weren't? And anyway, the fakers (approximately everyone) don't have a choice but to be fakers, since the truth (I want this job because I want the money and visa it will confer) is disqualifying. Because no one is motivated primarily on the opportunity to work on adtech (to pick a popular example), one must choose one of:

1) Be truthful, and say the main reason you want the job is the money and the visa. You will be looked over as not having enough passion for the work.

2) Lie completely and say your number one motivation is adtech, something you would prostrate yourself to do in slum conditions if necessary. You will be sussed out as a faker.

3) Come up with some mixture of the two that the company can believe. If you can fool them into thinking you are at least somewhat motivated by the chance to work on their awful product, but also that there is truthfully some other motivation, you come across as a good bet and might not be thrown out of the pipeline.

A no-op is exactly what the candidate wants. The candidate wants to be judged on their skills which are transferable from job to job. There's nothing to "see through" here which is precisely why it's a no-op.

> A no-op is exactly what the candidate wants. The candidate wants to be judged on their skills which are transferable from job to job.

The interview is to determine their skills.

Some candidates will talk about their work history for 30 minutes and you leave the room with no real idea what they did. They tell you they created synergies and did cross-functional coordination with stakeholders in a metrics-driven blah blah blah. You receive no usable information about what they did, what they can do, or how much of the thing they talked about was due to their work. All you know is that they can talk a lot.

If they're applying to a dysfunctional vibes-based workplace then delivering an empty vibes-based interview can work. Smart people actively try to filter themselves out of those companies, not into them.

There are questions where it's time to shine with your skills and experience and then there are questions that are kind of snore because they invite everyone to give perfect answers.

Why do you want to relocate is one of them.

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