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Comment by PopeOfNope | Hacker News Reader

Does anybody believe you when you say those things in a job interview, though? I wouldn't. A job interview is fundamentally a competition against other candidates. If you have two candidates and one finishes the task in half the time he's more likely to get the job. Time is a factor in everything. Same with looking things up. It's considerably more impressive to be able to recall minute technical details without having to look them up.

The resulting cognitive dissonance adds more pressure to the situation instead of relieving it.

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> A job interview is fundamentally a competition against other candidates.

That's hardly the case. Hiring for programming is different from hiring for a cashier. The programming world, at least, if you hiring for good programmers, would rarely have a queue of candidates lined-up. You get tons of resumes daily, sift through BS, find someone good, get to know him more and after some rounds, you hire him if he is worth his salt.

Rarely you would hear the phrase, "We hired the other candidate because he was skin-of-teeth better than you." Judging from the lack of engineers, a company would be very lucky to have more than one really good candidate for a position.

this is exactly my experience as well. having very recently completed a round of interviews for new hires, I experienced this directly. we wanted to hire 2 engineers. we interviewed about 20. found 4 that we liked. 2 of those 4 took other offers at other places they interviewed. we hired the 2 (that we liked, they have been good hires so far!) that were left.

there was never anything close to anybody getting "cut" in favor of another interviewee that was fractionally better than they were. we fully intended to make offers to everyone that we thought was good.

> Does anybody believe you when you say those things in a job interview, though? I wouldn't. A job interview is fundamentally a competition against other candidates.

I think you are being a bit negative. Why not believe the interviewer? It seems pointless to trick candidates by suggesting they are safe to look things up, then secretly judging them worse than other candidates. I would judge more harshly someone who didn't ask if they could look something up, or assumed they couldn't. Particularly so if they had been told they could but then proceeded to struggle and not look something up or ask the interviewer. I'd rather someone I may work with have a relaxed attitude and inherent curiosity rather than a paralyzing fear of failure.

Also viewing it as fundamentally a competition is focusing a lot on the negative perspective from your side. An interview is about finding a good match between a company and an employee. It can be just as much about you finding somewhere you want to work as it can about them comparing you to other candidates.

There may not even be other candidates, and they could be trying to make you comfortable and give you an idea of what it would be like to work together. Maybe suggesting that they do understand the cognitive dissonance and they do understand that interviews are stressful and hence no need to add additional pressure.

> Does anybody believe you when you say those things in a job interview, though? I wouldn't. A job interview is fundamentally a competition against other candidates. If you have two candidates and one finishes the task in half the time he's more likely to get the job.

Not at all.

I have one hour to decide if I want to work with a candidate.

How quickly someone works? Sure, that is important.

How good is their sense of humor? Can they joke around? Can they be involved in a technical deep dive on a problem? How about coming up with test cases?

I have 60 minutes and one programming problem. I've hired people who've taken from 5 minutes to 40.

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