[mistrial9]

two real stories -- one is a successful but small company whose products I admired; I brought a demo that I wrote and showed it in the interview (yes this did actually happen long ago), I then asked the interviewer directly "how did I do this?" .. he was the engineering manager for all the coders, founder level and had an actual PhD in physics.. ten years older than me perhaps.. and, of course he did not know! he was a good sport about it. He was impressed! tricky graphics.. honestly I did get further but I wanted more money than they wanted to spend so it didnt happen. Second story is that I interviewed at Giant Company with a technical manager, who asked me a coding question about operating system code.. I had actually studied the OS source code for that particular part in the week before the interview. I then recited a lengthy and detailed description of the OS mechanism and afterwards, knowing I had hit the right points, I asked him -- how is it that you know about that, it is pretty obscure. He confidently leaned back, no drama, and replied "you mention that in your resume so I asked about it. I thought it would be a good question" .. he had no previous exposure to that topic and basically admitted it. (all before this hazing style become "standard").

ps- the first time I saw the hazing style interview was a group of technical project managers from Microsoft, on the campus of Apple, interviewing for a certain project. I suspect Google picked it up partly from Microsoft, who designed the method to control the interview and watch the response from the candidates. I asked "dont you want to see examples of my actual work?" and the frat-guy type said "no" flatly. also long ago...

I enjoyed reading the recent post here about interviews at Google where a introverted hardware guy was literally pursued by Google, and when he went for the interview, they started doing this "grad school algorithms" routine on him. Who here knows hardware? its not the same subject .. anyway, best to all

[strich]

I'm not sure I understand the point you're making with your story - the technical manager wasn't 'hazing' you, they were simply trying to validate your cv against reality by making to talk to what's on there in detail. Are you suggesting what he did was a bad interview practice?

[cjohnson318]

> "you mention that in your resume so I asked about it. I thought it would be a good question"

Sounds pretty reasonable to me. I ask people about relevant experience they've listed on their resumes all the time.

[kevinventullo]

Would you prefer to be asked questions unrelated to your CV?