[Jach]

I've been doing more giving than taking of interviews in the last years and think almost all the problems are on the interviewer side, but yeah, it's useful to speak to the candidate faced with this. My own perspective is somewhat different, and is really meant for these context-light scenarios, real scenarios will have a lot more context that will help both sides of the table do better at accomplishing their respective purposes. Anyway given that mind reading is impossible, and that you want the job, what to do? The answer is.. you have to guess based on the context you do have available.

There's not really a good general solution here, and you might guess in a way that really screws you up. It's easy for the interviewer to tell if the candidate is attempting a "just feed me what I want to hear" strategy, if the candidate has guessed wrong about what I actually want to hear, and now the candidate appears deceitful, a double-whammy. If they have guessed right, though, it's much harder for the interviewer to pick up on it -- which is why for hiring programmers at least it's common (even if rife with its own pitfalls) to do more objective things like asking for a demonstration of basic coding capabilities, because sometimes some people who must really want the job and have Masters degrees and can talk somebody's ear off in a confident enough way to get this far still somehow can't seem to program when asked, the primary activity we need them to do.

Life's not about maximizing the chances of getting a particular job, though. I like ethical policies of being maximally honest, even if you shoot yourself in the foot by revealing you're a bit crazy about homoiconicity or whatever... And generally speaking it's not a terrible guess to assume the interviewer just wants an honest answer primarily even if secondarily the content of the answer isn't what they were hoping for. It's also easy to execute on that guess, since it's usually easy to come off as honest if you're being honest. If the interviewer asks a question that does seem job related (like this accessibility example), honesty is also helpful in that even if your honest answer differs from the interviewer's expected answer, and you don't get hired like you wanted, you might have dodged a bullet by at least surfacing that the difference in opinion or expectations was apparently a big deal there before actually taking the job. Wasteful interviews are wasteful, but it's even more wasteful to take a job, start going through onboarding, and only then you and/or the employer beginning to realize things probably won't work out.

Though if the interviewer asks a loaded question, i.e. one which is well known to be a topic of contention in the industry, it's worth re-evaluating your guess and to respond accordingly. I wouldn't suggest ever outright lying, but the honest, direct answer might not be your friend and as with any adversarial conversation (interviews are not casual chats at a meetup with industry peers, even if they can sometimes feel structurally similar) giving too much information can be detrimental.

Example, the interviewer might toss out "So, tabs or spaces?" Maybe you honestly believe spaces, and maybe you also honestly believe this is something worth flaming about and are ready to go at it if the interviewer dares claim for tabs. You might reveal the basic answer of "Spaces", I wouldn't advise revealing the latter information. Here's an opportunity to guess the intent though, maybe the interviewer just wants to see if you'll try to be funny about the answer rather than answer directly. Ideally the interviewer would guide the interview so that whatever their intention is will be clear.

> "there are no right or wrong answers in this interview."

It's good to tell the candidates something about what your expectations are, that's my whole point! Though I might rework this one a bit. Some personalities would be instantly alarmed by such a phrase... For myself, I'd ignore it and proceed as normal, though part of me would want to ask "So you've already decided on yes/no? Want to regain the hour?"

[speedplane]

> for hiring programmers at least it's common (even if rife with its own pitfalls) to do more objective things like asking for a demonstration of basic coding capabilities

I'm a developer but was previously a practicing attorney. If you think developer interviews are bad, you should try interviewing for a law firm. Outside of the objective but course metrics like law school rank and class rank, it's almost impossible to tell if a candidate will be a good lawyer or a bad one. Most interviews I was on and administered, we just chatted. The purpose of the interview was to determine if you could hold a normal conversation.

Fun anecdote about this. The morning before a law firm interview I cut myself shaving. It dried and the initial interview went well. But then we went to lunch, and when I wiped my face with a napkin, the cut opened up. I started bleeding all over the place, soaking my napkin in red. The people interviewing me told me to feel free to go to the bathroom and take care of it, but I said "no, I'm fine", and continued to literally make a bloody mess. That was the wrong answer. The right one was to be cool but handle it. I didn't get that job.

[l_t]

Thanks for the feedback! I can see how that phrase might seem alarming because it just explains what not to do, not what you should do.

I try to tell my candidates something like: "During this interview, my main goal is to understand what it's like to work with you as a coworker. We're not looking for specific right or wrong answers, but more to work together as allies to find the best design." (Background: My interviews usually take the form of pair programming or design discussion).

I'd be curious if you have any recommendations for how I could improve that. I definitely don't want to alarm anybody, if anything my goal is that you can relax and try to treat me like a coworker (to the greatest degree possible in an otherwise stressful setting).

edit: Random tip, although you probably know this already: If the interviewer asks "tabs or spaces?" the correct answer is usually "Whatever the existing code/linter uses." That's one of those questions that there is definitely a right and wrong answer for, because it's basically a culture question not a technical question, so it's one of those questions I always avoid asking :)

[Jach]

Another great answer for many things is "It depends". :)

I don't have an issue with your approach (I think interviewers who think about the issue at all and occasionally tweak things are going to do better than those who don't) and the fuller version makes it pretty clear that the goal is to create a feeling of getting along well. For many companies the candidate is also interested in that information, but at other companies it doesn't really matter because if hired the two won't actually work with each other, or it will be brief as the new hire changes teams.

I don't do pairing in my interviews but I've thought about it. Before doing it for real I'd want to pair with a coworker on a problem neither of us have solved before, which will happen naturally if pairing is part of the company culture, then pair with them later on a problem I had previously solved but they had not, and see what differences in my own behavior (if any) appear when I have one of the possible solutions in mind. That's my main concern with doing it with a candidate, that the balance on one side of the pair for driving things is just not natural to the usual setting.

You could eliminate that concern by always using a novel problem to yourself (I've got a handful of problems I know something about but have never tried to solve, I do think it'd be fun to try and solve them with a candidate) but then there's the secondary concern in that by the end of it do you really have anything you can say besides "I do/do not get along with them and think we'd work well together"? I like to be able to say a little bit more than that, and also to create the opportunity to say "I like both of these candidates, can't say which one more, they both passed the threshold of solving the problem's basic case, but this one's code covered an extra edge case without me pointing it out." It happens that sometimes I can't even say that, of course, and multiple candidates are equivalent on the criteria I measured. But sometimes it's fine, you just care about some basic threshold, and you can just extend the offer to the first person that satisfies. I think this is probably the case more than many companies big and small want to admit.

[blankaccount]

> "Anyway given that mind reading is impossible, and that you want the job, what to do?"

> "Example, the interviewer might toss out "So, tabs or spaces?" ...and maybe you also honestly believe this is something worth flaming about ... I wouldn't advise revealing the latter information. Here's an opportunity to guess the intent though."

To me, this reads as "if you want the job then you [should/are entitled to] misrepresent yourself to bypass the filtering mechanism". If that's the case, then your whole reply reads as a complaint about how hard it is to cheat when anti-cheating tactics are in place.

Am I misunderstanding?

[speedplane]

>> the interviewer might toss out "So, tabs or spaces?" ... maybe you also honestly believe this is something worth flaming about ... I wouldn't advise revealing the latter information.

> this reads as "if you want the job then you [should/are entitled to] misrepresent yourself to bypass the filtering mechanism".

I don't think so... it's more like, if you have a deeply held viewpoint, can you effectively work with others who have different viewpoints? If you can strike a compromise or convince them to change, that's the best. If you can bury your differences, that's not ideal but at least workable.

Given the spaces/tabs example, if you are sincerely passionate about using spaces instead of tabs, and you're able to convince a tab-user to switch to spaces without upsetting them, that's the best, demonstrating leadership. Almost as good, is if you can explain how much you like spaces but have happily worked together with tab users (tabbers?). Finally, if you say you like spaces but you're happy to keep silent about it (or if you don't mention it at all), that's not as good as the others, but probably fine too.

Any company that values innovation should encourage differing viewpoints to be raised, but not to the point that it becomes a distraction and hinders overall productivity.

[blankaccount]

If one of your strongly held beliefs is "spaces over tabs" and you think that belief is information that has sway in the interview AND you take the advice to not reveal the information, then how are you not misrepresenting yourself?

You're answering like a person who doesn't hold strong beliefs to a question designed to identify strong beliefs, knowing that you are a person who holds those strong beliefs. Is that not misrepresentation to bypass the filtering mechanism?

We might be talking about slightly different things - if you have a strong belief then I agree you should try sell it, and doing so would demonstrate leadership qualities.

[speedplane]

> If one of your strongly held beliefs is "spaces over tabs" and you think that belief is information that has sway in the interview AND you take the advice to not reveal the information, then how are you not misrepresenting yourself?

In your example, yes, you would be misrepresenting yourself. But the OP's example is different. Anyone who believes strongly in "spaces over tabs" would/should also know how many silly unproductive flame wars they've started, and also how there may be reasonable arguments on either side. If you do indeed believe strongly in something, then by all means go ahead and say it. But you'd better be able to talk about it intelligently and have considered both sides of the argument. If you're not as educated on the subject, then it's probably not the best idea to wade into the subject during an interview.

That's all this is. Just know your own positions relative to others.

[Jach]

I'm not sure how you're relating anything there to commentary on cheating...

My complaint is with interviewers and their wasteful, unfair hidden criteria. You could phrase it as a complaint that interviewers make use of filtering mechanisms that are impossible to know about without the ability to read minds. There's not necessarily anything wrong with certain filters per se, but it's important the candidate be aware what they are, as early as possible -- if it's in the job description this allows for candidate self-filtering, even.

My advice to interviewees who nevertheless have to deal with such hidden criteria isn't "just always be honest!" but "since you can't mind-read, you have to guess at the hidden criteria, sorry."

I'd suggest being honest as the default, especially if you have no good guess what the real criteria is, or if you're not even presented with anything that gives you a whiff of a hidden criteria being present. But you can be honest without also going into details about grandpa's barn incident. Sometimes you do have a good guess into the interviewer's mind, though, or at least a sense of "reading the atmosphere". (Some interviewers explicitly use hidden criteria but drop more and more hints throughout the interview to eventually reveal it, hoping the candidate notices on their own first.) It might indicate that you should answer the question with a silly meme that came to mind, instead of directly. Or hey, maybe now you realize those details about the barn would be helpful to elaborate on after all. You might also want to adjust your posture if you're getting the sense that they don't appreciate slouchers here, which would be a hidden criteria applied to the interaction itself rather than a particular question.

I wouldn't advocate misrepresenting yourself, but it's standard advice to represent yourself in the best light you can.