[jumper_F00BA2]

When faced with questions that have answers I could obviously discern by writing and running two lines of code, I willfully shrug, answer by intuition, hoping that's the trap for the wrong answer, and wait for a facial expression.

Today I was asked a question about inheritance and references within a constructor, in which the answer was an either/or for the parent or child class.

I threw up my hands and deliberately said "I dunno parent, no wait! Child!" because honestly who cares, when you can figure something like that out without even googling for it.

A question like that is like asking someone what might they expect a Hello World! program to print.

Waste my time, and I waste yours right back. I could care less what you think about me.

[throwawaymath]

I don't really agree with these kinds of questions, but to be honest I find your response to be pretty childish. In my opinion it would be better to be honest and say you don't really know, but that you believe you could quickly find out. But your response indicates that you have the potential to be passive aggressive and uncooperative when presented with a question you disagree with.

Now from the interviewer's perspective, they don't know you're absolutely fed up with the culture of tech interviews. They can't see the full interiority of your thoughts. So they can't know why you're reacting like this, all they can see is your behavior. Keep in mind that you're most likely punishing an interviewer who has either been given a mandate for these questions or who doesn't know any better. From your perspective this could be a teachable moment or a way to showcase your thinking.

Even though that might have been a poor question to ask, doing what you did doesn't demonstrate that your time is important. It demonstrates you might have problems being professional and communicating effectively. It signals that you think your time is so important that you're willing to potentially burn an interview to spite someone asking you a question you feel is beneath you.

It's not a good look. Don't give people reasons to write you off.

[jumper_F00BA2]

Sympathy for the interviewer. Well guess what, you're not going to find much luck pulling this yarn.

Some interviewers get the fist. And that's just the way it goes.

If I'm supposed to play toady to this dog and pony show we're trying put on together, don't step in front of me with some condescending question, that we both know is cherry-picked trivia. You design questions to stump people, knock them off balance, introduce a choke, and project a facade of superiority, when we both know that's not fair play, and you expect something other than contempt?

I'm not reciting all the state capitals, every U.S. holiday on the calendar, and every county in the state of California for you. Try your luck with the next applicant.

You can't expect me to roll over as subordinate, when I'm looking right at you, and you and I both know that the canned question you just asked is total bullshit. Sorry, now I know you're a follower, not a leader, and I won't be led by you. Interview over.

And besides, do you really believe that passive aggression, as a personality trait, isn't a possibility, simply because it wasn't on display during that particular interview. Most smart people do have a passive aggressive mean streak, because it's a tactic, not a personality trait. It's in everyone's tool kit, and smart people use it in anger. If it gets used on you, especially when everyone in the room was trying to make a good first impression, maybe you did something to provoke that.

[throwawaymath]

So I can tell you're pretty upset about being treated this way, and I can sympathize with the frustration. But maybe my point will be better received if I clarify it to make it more concise. In essence:

1. You are responding to these kinds of interviews as though the interviewers are malicious, self-aware of their biases and intentionally trying to personally offend you. But it's not personal and not all interviewers are trying to conspire like this. Consider that what you're feeling and perceiving may not be intended by the interviewers.

2. As a corollary, your relationship and responses to these interviewers are retributional and deconstructive instead of educational and constructive. You're writing off companies because their interviewers offend your sensibilities. But just as interviewers don't have enough information to know why you're reacting the way you are, you don't know if they're trying to be as demeaning as you feel they're being.

In other words, not all companies with suboptimal interviewing methods are shitty companies. Probably most are not! Given that, the way you're reacting isn't just a sensitivity to personal offense, it's getting in your own way professionally.

[enterogative]

It's on the person holding all the cards to display their power judiciously. Something designed to provoke undue stress is either glib or provocative, by default.

Don't forget, in this card game, you may be the dealer and the asymetric equation may be tipped in your favor, but play fair or some of the players might surprise you by throwing the game.

As "The Boss" you better not only know more, but also consider how put that on display. If you're actually in possession of gifted, multi-faceted intelligence, you won't need to read minds, so much as place yourselves in the shoes of the candidate, as you probe for awareness of facts, and exposure to subject matter.

It's often enough, to understand the conceptual interplay of known processes, before worrying about which color Teletubbie was the "funny" one.

[abiox]

> it's a tactic, not a personality trait

that seems like a false dichotomy. you behave as cruel and abusive as you do because it's within you to behave that way.

[mosselman]

When do you ever have to rely on 100% top of mind knowledge like that when programming anyway? I usually have a console open and google even fairly trivial things because of how much quicker (second or ~10) it is to look at the API than it is to get it wrong when reloading my code and having to try again.

Usually I challenge getting silly 'traverse this data structure' questions and want to hear what they expect to get out of it.

Side note: The correct expression is "I _couldn't_ care less"

[iopuy]

I thought the same thing until I started doing a significant amount of code reviews. You need to know these things to explain to more junior devs to help them become better programmers.

[mosselman]

Late to reply here, but you don't need to have the exact syntax and code at the top of your mind to review something. You just need the experience to recognise if something can be done in a different way or not. You can always google the exact improvement, implementation, etc later.

[ItsMe000001]

But that's the beauty of the human brain: It knows what is needed and you are going to remember very quickly all those things - when you actually need them. So if you actually have people to coach you will learn and remember all those things effortlessly and almost without noticing it yourself, but when your brain detects no use for something to push something into it by brute force is a pain. It's one thing to learn the basics, it's another to fill your mind with specifics needlessly.

I once had an interview for a very well-paid freelancer position in a large company and could not answer the question "What is a right join?". It's not like I don't know that stuff - I do, but it's strange: there are many things like that, I actually know them, but I have to look them up. I only need 5 seconds then I remember everything. But when asked out of the blue I'm clueless. I was hired - and I became the guy they asked when a large Oracle query had to be constructed to look something up in the DB. Today, right now, I again only have a fuzzy notion of "right join" and would have to look up the details. I happily remove stuff from working memory that I don't need - but one 5-10 seconds look at one of thousands of webpages describing joins is all it takes to have that knowledge back in my working memory.

There are many things that I could not answer when asked out of the blue in an interview, and yet I would claim "I know that stuff". It's not a contradiction. For the last couple of years I've been learning new things like crazy, thanks to edX and Coursera and years of time off work to recover my health. Over 60 (finished) courses thus far, many of them topics I never had anything to do with before (medical mostly). I happily shift knowledge in and out all the time, I noticed how impossible - and useless - it is to keep anything in working memory for long. I'm not sure I could name all cranial nerves right now, and I took several neuroscience courses, they were some of my favorites. Yet I would claim that I know the, I just need a quick glance at a page about cranial nerves and it would all come back.

I'm not a walking Wikipedia, and those kinds of interviews are only useful to test what someone had to deal with in the time just before the interview. Sure, it weeds out clueless people - and a lot of good ones.

What a lot of people commenting on the interview topic also ignore is again that brains don't work like computers: context matters - extremely. We have studies showing that people think differently depending on whether they walk, sit in a small room or a large room, with the exact same task. Being in an interview is not just "stressful" - it's a very specific situation. It cannot just be compared to other merely stressful situations. You can do very well under stress - but not under interview stress. Interviews are, for one, somewhat adversarial. People around you try to find your weaknesses, they will get rid of you if you leave the wrong impression. Later on the job when it becomes stressful people work with you instead, everybody as a team towards the same goal. Not to mention that finding a job is not exactly easy no matter how low the unemployment rate. The kind of stress of an interview compares to nothing in ones actual work.

After the neuroscience courses, here is extremely rough my mental model to explain learning (based on my own interpretation of what I learned, this wasn't part of the curriculum way too fuzzy for actual neuroscience):

It's not like computer (or paper) storage that you fill with "knowledge" and then it sits there ready to be used by "the CPU" (which the brain is not, the computer model to explain the brain is completely off).

Instead, it's like paths through wilderness created by things repeatedly walking the same routes. When you learn you create paths. Literally. Strengthening/weakening of existing connections but also creating and abandoning synaptic connections. But the paths don't encode the concrete knowledge! What in our (computer-centric) models are concrete individual items in the brain becomes the result of signals traveling all over, and a concept we consider one item is the result of waves of signals going all over many paths in the brain, and not just once but with loops.

So when you learn something you don't learn the concrete knowledge like a computer does: "Now it's in memory and in the original form immediately accessible". In the brain it's something else. What created the "tracks" is gone but the tracks are still there! You don't have the original item you learned available, you instead have the path that it created. What exactly that means is not quite clear, but obviously you know something. That something, however, is not a static item of knowledge, it's something dynamic! It becomes useful when you use it.

What you cannot expect is that you put in concrete knowledge and at any later point get the exact same thing out. That's what we have books and computer storage for, the brain does not work like that. Nor should it! We developed those external tools to extend our brains, why are we trying to let our brains be like our tools? Yes, brains are much less predictable. Even from person to person, giving them the exact same knowledge creates different paths in each person's already different brain, and what you get out after feeding them the same input is even more different. Since we have become obsessed with creating predictable results we prefer testing in a way that would work better for how you would test a computer system.

I think something pretty much always overlooked is this: The brain does not attempt to encode the concepts that we talk about (such as "house", "tree", "friendship", "database"). It is the opposite. Our language attempts to represent the inside of our brains, in an approximation that depends on the goal and the context. For maximum confusion we then created new stuff within that externalized language system - and then try to put it back into the brain. There is nothing solid about it, it's all very dynamic and fuzzy. I see communication between humans more like trying to synchronize different dynamic systems. "Fire and forget" (send information and expect it to be understood) only works when there was a lot of prior synchronization. That means when new people meet in a new context (for at least one of them, in an interview) it will go more smoothly if they all share the same base synchronization, the same background - but that may actually be by accident. Out of tune communication partners might actually get better results after they "synchronize their waves". The "tuning" also is not between two fixed systems, both keep changing.

What I look for in new people is not how they are currently tuned but their "tunability", especially "auto-tunability". That means I care more about how much they do on their own to find things out. When an employee does experiments on their own, finds things out that nobody asked them about, digs deep into a problem without waiting to be told to do so - to me that's far more valuable than any amount of static knowledge.

[throwaway0255]

If all the questions were relevant and had objective solutions, they would be put into a lot of situations where they have no justifiable reason to reject somebody that they would prefer to discriminate against.