[chiefalchemist]

I field that question but I don't like it. In a word, it's lazy. The interviewers has my CV, why not say, "Tell me about Proj X you mentioned..."

I've had two interviews in the last week and I'm not sure why they bothered. Both came off as disengaged. Both probably didn't prep for the conversion. Both asked that question.

Yawn.

[syndicatedjelly]

How else is someone supposed to learn about your work experience, other than directly asking about it? How much research are they supposed to do ahead of time? Not everyone's code is publicly available on GitHub, and no sane interviewer has time to sit around reading every single line of code that each of their candidates has written. Summarizing each of your major professional projects of your career in a few minutes is really not a whole lot to ask.

I really don't get this extreme aversion of software engineers to answering any sort of question in an interview that requires a marginal amount of thinking. This attitude comes off as extremely disingenuous, and at the very least indicates that they have something to hide about their experience. If they took tests in school the same way they answer interview questions, they would have flunked out of first semester.

[chiefalchemist]

"Tell me about a project you worked on..."

That's not asking directly. It's vague. It's ambiguous. It's lazy. It's a cover for not having taken the time to prepare for the meeting (read: interview).

On the other hand, "I see Project X on your CV. Sounds interesting. Tell me more about that...." Is a legit question.

And no one expects every line of code to be looked at. That said, my CV has a section with links to repos. And yet I still get, "Can you send some links to code samples?"

Engineers with an aversion to questions? How about engineers who are tired of showing up to interviews and the hiring person/peoples are unprepared? The questions are a tell, a signal. And too often it's a tell with a smell. The aversion is to that smell.

[sriram_malhar]

> That's not asking directly. It's vague. It's ambiguous. It's lazy. It's a cover for not having taken the time to prepare for the meeting (read: interview).

I beg to differ. I think the more ambiguous the question to start with, the wider the field of possible followups. Perhaps project Y is something that the candidate is more excited about than project X, and maybe had a bigger role in.

I believe that, in a friendly setting, one can pick up a lot of information about the candidate's ability to work with ambiguity, from the clarity with which they have organized their thoughts, the concision with which they have presented it, their humility about their contribution, about the things that excited them. Or lack thereof. The interviewer need not be familiar with the details of that project to pick up on this.