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Comment by sirgawain33 | Hacker News Reader

Unless I'm being thick, I think the point of this parable is to question the developer, not the interviewer.

Despite using a bunch of fancy new language feature, name-dropping Knuth, and describing the solution for an hour, the result is code with no additional benefit and significantly worse maintainability.

Sometimes being smart doesn't have to look so smart.

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Looking at the previous posts by this author it looks as though he's got a very specific interest in playing with JavaScript language features.

So I'm guessing this wasn't ever a real situation, just a fantasy story about how he'd love for an interview to play out.

And yet... At the end of the story, all three participants (recruiter, company, and candidate) have failed to get what they want.

Somehow, this does not come across as a fantasy being played out, more of a cautionary tale.

I dunno, the interviewer provides the template code as ECMAScript 2015 ?

Seems incredibly bleeding edge for an interview question.

And then the start of his reply is 'Using babeljs.io, I’ll write this in ECMASCript 2015 notation.', which is weird given the example code was already implied to be in this.

In the story, the very next day The Carpenter got a generous contract from FOG, a stealth startup doing very interesting work, and promptly forgot all about Thing. It sounds like he got exactly what he wanted.

That might be a red-herring. When times are good, people get positive reinforcement for doing bad things. Thing might hire the next programmer, and the Carpenter gets the next job, and everybody assumes that the right best way to conduct an interview is for both people to “flip the bozo bit” on each other as soon as possible.

Then when it becomes hard to find good people, Thing suffers because they are too quick to reject people based on one answer. And if the Carpenter finds there are few jobs that suit his criteria, he has trouble getting one with the style of answer he tries to jam into every question.

That’s a bit of a metaphor for how many (but not all) companies become internal shit-shows in tech. They get a lot of positive feedback (raising money, adulation from HN) for their tech, but meanwhile are terrible managers.

It takes great discipline (and possible great mentoring) to say to yourself, “things are going well, but what am I doing wrong that I just happen to be getting away with?"

You bring up a good point, but it's not one supported by the text of the story. Perhaps that's why it's a good story: everybody reads into it their personal experiences and assumes it means what they want it to mean.

FWIW, the meaning I took away from it is "Well, this is a cool way of looking at things. Some people will run away screaming, some people will appreciate it. If you want a happy life, find the people who appreciate it and don't worry so much about the people who don't see things your way."

So be less smart than the interviewer but more smart than the last person they interviewed?

There's interesting social psychology to back that up: status ambiguity as the fastest way to endear yourself to the new group. Representing higher status than the entire group marks you as a threat. Representing lower status than the entire group marks you as a waste of time. Projecting a fuzzy medium somewhere below the top people and above the worst endears you to everyone.

Very true, but there are also arguments about why you should always surround yourself with people that are smarter than you for both personal growth and bottom line results. Especially in the fast paced startup culture, you need the smartest and fastest people around.

It comes off as a parable about the fact that we write for our peers and our employers. We may aspire to be academics, but unless our peers and employers are academics, a highly technical, academic approach to problems will fail.

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