[734129837261]

In job interviews, people don't write the code they would write normally, they write the code that they think the interviewer wants to see.

And that brings me to a topic that's entirely different but also very relevant: job interviews bring interviewer-biases with them.

If you run into an old-school interviewer who would do exactly that "Prius extends Car extends Vehicle, etc." nonsense, but you don't know it, they would rate you negatively.

If you run into someone who is just in love with functional programming, you'll lose any OO implementation.

If you run into someone who doesn't like it when you ask questions, you'll lose. If you run into someone who doesn't like you asking questions they don't know the answer to, you lose.

And if you get sent a 3-hour long Hackerrank or Leetcode algorithmic test, everybody loses.

Tech job interviews are just horribly biased and the game is won if you read your audience correctly. And even then, if the other person is a racist, or just doesn't like your face, or had a bad day, or feels threatened, or disapproves of how you write "Javascript" instead of "JavaScript", you still lose.

[onpensionsterm]

Not including the racist discrimination example, I'm not sure that this is a bad problem. I believe there is a tendency for us to leave the schooling system and start viewing interviews as though they were our new exams, where failure is your own fault. I argue that interviews are the starting point of a new relationship, so the closest analogy is actually a date. If you're on a date and express your values and the other person rejects you for it, it simply means you don't make a good relationship - even if it's just because the other person has unfair demands.

So don't project programming ideals you don't believe in. If they can't reconcile different opinions, it's their problem. You won't have the conviction or experience to do it convincingly anyway.

[kevinmchugh]

And if they don't like you asking questions, you've really dodged a bullet!

[BoorishBears]

Every example you listed would be dodging an enormous bullet.

The exact example the grandparent used was essentially a wrong answer, so our "old-school interviewer" (that sounds kind of ageist doesn't it?) marking us down for not using it is a bad thing.

An interviewer who loves functional programming and doesn't communicate any preference then marks you down for not reading their mind is someone to avoid.

An interviewer who punishes you for asking questions is a huge red flag and you'll be dodging a huge bullet.

I'm a self-taught dev so I definitely have some thoughts on how tech interviewing goes, but an interview runs both ways. I'd much rather miss out on a job because the other person was racist or they hate when people ask questions, than to end up working with them.

[Avshalom]

"Sure I missed rent and now I have an eviction on my record and I'm sleeping in a car but at least I didn't get a job, bullet dodged"

[BoorishBears]

"Your advice doesn't work out in every single situation ever experienced by a human so I'm going to come up with a sarcastic comment that says nothing of value to point that out."

You'd think common sense would tell one not to define what's good for them in general based on what's good for you when they're "missing rent with an eviction and sleeping in your car".

[yCombLinks]

Not every person in the interview process is anywhere near you in the org though, sometimes great jobs are behind a shitty interview

[bdg]

Yes, and sometimes shitty jobs are behind great people. Candidates get catfished in interviews all the time.

[BoorishBears]

In my experience there are few great jobs behind shitty people. Great jobs tend to not put shitty people in the hiring loop.

Similar works backwards, if you're using the interview to also ask the right questions, good people are generally not going to lie to you...

[linuxftw]

It's always this. Every interview I've had is a quest for the interviewer to demonstrate they know more about the subject they quiz me about than I do. This is especially true with kubernetes, it's a vast project with many areas, but if you don't know whatever niche the interviewer is interested in, you will struggle.

[bdg]

Yes, our industry has a lot of inexperienced managers and interviewers who don't know what to evaluate or how to clarify the goal for a candidate.

I think this is a different challenge related to the "background" hidden context: training interviewers. I think the "foreground" discussion point ("please make me a car") is way less relevant than the skill of an interviewer.

For about a year I tried this with every candidate: literally tell them what I am looking for in the interview and what is on my scorecard. Nobody asked any questions even once.

[zdragnar]

> If you run into someone who doesn't like it when you ask questions, you'll lose. If you run into someone who doesn't like you asking questions they don't know the answer to, you lose.

That's actually a win in your book, not a loss!

[im3w1l]

Just thinking here, but what if you take the guesswork out of it "Here at Company X our philosophy is to avoid deep class hierarchies. How would you model..."