[jb3689]

A good interviewer won’t be looking for a single solution to the problem. I’d expect them to entertain the Google Sheets answer - it’s good signal that the candidate will consider what already exists in the world. I’d rather extend the problem: the team is spending considerable time iterating with manual entry, what would you do?

[EthanHeilman]

Complete agreement. "Excellent answer, that is what I would do as well, now what if we wanted to build it in-house?"

[SteveNuts]

> "now what if we wanted to build it in-house?"

"Well I would probably go home and work on my resume because that's a fool's errand."

I hate going to work and reinventing wheels all day because the company I work for thinks it's so special that every business function needs a 100% tailored solution to solved problems. I much prefer working somewhere that's able to tailor business processes to conform to existing standards.

But maybe that's just me.

[maccard]

I’ve interviewed a few hundred people. Probably approaching a thousand, if not already. An interview is a scenario, and if you aren’t willing to engage in the scenario that we all agreed to partake in, that’s a huge warning sign that you’re going to be difficult later down the line. The point of the question is to have something remotely understandable for both sides to talk about, that’s it.

[wpietri]

I'd call it an interviewer failure, not an interviewee failure.

I absolutely want people I hire to be "difficult" when the moment calls for it. If the scenario is one where the right business/user choice is "let them keep using Google Sheets", then the answer I want is "Google Sheets seems fine to me", no matter what people with more power start out wanting. Too many developers have been encouraged to be minions, not professionals.

Ditto for ones who act like everything is a nail for their coding hammer. A developer who can save a company a couple hundred thousand dollars by not turning something simple into a big coding project is a rare and precious commodity. Or should be, at least.

The thing to do isn't to give demerits for "being difficult". The thing to do is to then add something to the scenario where they get into the thing you want them to get to. "For this, we need better access control than Google Sheets allows us." Or, "We need this to be more closely integrated with our accounting system."

Unless, of course, what you're hiring for is the willingness to roll over for unreasonable requests from people with more power. Which, honestly, a lot of places are.

[Quarrelsome]

> I absolutely want people I hire to be "difficult" when the moment calls for it.

<3. What do you think makes the difference here in orgs that respect this and those that simply try to hire yesmen?

[wpietri]

Humans are primates, and primate dominance dynamics are going to be the default absent some conscious choice otherwise. Our whole executive/worker dichotomy is a descendant of the British class system. (E.g., note that airlines specifically have a "business class".) And MBA-driven business culture is focused on short-term managerial interest, not societal value or long-term business success.

I think all of those tendencies come to the fore at any organization that doesn't have either a strong sense of mission or a sufficiently desperate need for success that they pay attention to material reality rather than social reality. With a possible partial exception for things like co-ops and other places where the culture is fundamentally different enough. E.g., Mondragon, or Zingerman's.

I think Google, back in its don't be evil/organize the world's information era, probably qualified. They started with a very strong mission-driven culture rooted in academics and engineering. It took a fair bit of time for MBA dogmas to make it like most other places. But from everything I hear, what once felt almost like a calling now is just another job.

[maccard]

> when the moment calls for it

In an interview when you’ve been explicitly asked to discuss a topic to have a technical discussion about something is not when the moment calls for it. Doubly so if you’ve been asked twice. If you’re not willing to put aside being technically correct when you’re trying to show off your best self, it’s pretty likely that when things get tough, you’ll behave the same.

> unless of course what you’re being for is the willingness to roll over for unreasonable requests from people with more power

D, do you think that someone saying “can we please talk about a technical topic, here’s an example we’re both likely familiar with” is looking for yes men? I actively want my team and coworkers to challenge me, but I absolutely don’t want to work with that person who appears at every meeting with a list of reasons why we shouldn’t do X.

[wpietri]

When I ask an interviewee a technical question, what I want is an answer that is correct technically.

If I want them to give me a different kind of technical answer, then I think it's on me to ask a question that actually requires what I'm looking for. It's not hard! All the Stripe interviewer had to say is, "Ok, great. It sounds like you have a good sense for system capacity. Now let's add another zero to all the load numbers." And then keep increasing orders of magnitude until they learn what they're looking to learn.

I am, just to be clear, not defending people being willfully obtuse or contrary jackasses. But that's not the scenario being described in either the Stripe story or the Google Sheets story I'm responding to. Two apparently reasonable people were asked technical questions and they gave answers that were the right thing for the business.

I think that's good and I like to hire people like that. I get lots of others don't, and I get the POSIWID reasons behind it. But I'm not going to pretend I think it's a healthy way to run an organization. And I also get that the people who like pretense and deference in interviews are not going to like me saying so. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[johnnyanmac]

>do you think that someone saying “can we please talk about a technical topic, here’s an example we’re both likely familiar with” is looking for yes men?

Probably. You say "likely familiar with" but interviews are conducted as if it's a pop quiz. Which I never understood.

If you want to have a decently technical discussion, why not just tell me ahead of time what topic and I come to the interview with research? Why do I have to guess that we're talking about dyanmic programming and be punished if you really cared about graph traversal? (meanwhile the interview is for an embedded programmer. Definitely reflects what you'll really do on the job).

I really hate how few initerviews really felt like they were testing my knowledge related to proper fundamentals and not treated as some pseudo-SAT schlock.

[Quarrelsome]

but also maybe its a green flag in that this employee might see the wood for the trees and save the company a lot of money later down the line. In my experience, a lot of engineers can waste a lot of time dicking around re-inventing wheels and whatnot.

While you consider it a huge warning sign, have you ever employed someone who would answer that way or are you assuming that you're not capable of making hiring mistakes? I can't help but think this "huge warning sign" might simply be a cognative bias where the interviewer is misdirecting their frustration in the poor design of their own process at the candidate [0].

For reference, I think both answers are fine and both perspectives (its a positive or a negative) are equally valid. Its just that I don't think we can confidently state either way.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rZ3ETK7-ZM8

[maccard]

> While you consider it a huge warning sign, have you ever employed someone who would answer that way or are you assuming that you're not capable of making hiring mistakes? I can't help but think this "huge warning sign" might simply be a cognative bias where the interviewer is misdirecting their frustration in the poor design of their own process at the candidate

Yes, I did. More than once. I always regretted it. Sure it could be a cognitive bias, but the entire interview process is essentially trying to figure out “can I work with this person”.

> I think both answers are fine and both perspectives are equally valid

I disagree - refusing to engage with the interview because you don’t like the question is perfectly valid to do, but don’t expect me to want to work with you over it. We’ve only got an hour, maximum, so any scenario we come up with is going to be contrived and simplified - if you can’t accept that then I’m going to make my decision based on that.

[Quarrelsome]

> Yes, I did. More than once. I always regretted it.

Fair.

> I disagree - refusing to engage with the interview because you don’t like the question is perfectly valid to do, but don’t expect me to want to work with you over it. We’ve only got an hour, maximum, so any scenario we come up with is going to be contrived and simplified - if you can’t accept that then I’m going to make my decision based on that.

Sure but lets not forget the other perspective. Candidates have to interview for a cumulative many hours over the course of a job hunt, only to have many interviewers batter them with an array of 1337code, pop quizes or contrived examples, none of which reflect the day to day work of the position they will fill. From their perspective their answer could well be a good one, albeit I agree that having some level of willingness to engage in the theatre is a positive sign.

In an auto-interview I recently did, I was given extremely limited time to "refactor" a bunch of code that was clearly broken. I chose not to refactor and instead fix the brokeness of the code, however I entirely expect to fail the interview because I fixed the problems instead of removing a couple of obviously duplicated code blocks. I can see why I would fail by not "following orders" but their async code was broken and the awful exception handling botched all their telemetry. From a "big picture" perspective I did do the right thing but it might be the case they're too stupid to know that I was doing the right thing (they're a multi-language company, so I assume they're less good at the language I specialise in).

Personally I think due to lack of industry organisation around certification or any sort of guild or union, we have a seriously difficult problem around hiring across the industry. In response to the extremely challenging task of vetting programmers I feel like orgs are simply fishing for reasons to disqualify candidates, as a reaction to this problem.

The rare positive experiences I've had interviewing were Amazon, who act like they want you to succeeed instead of fail or orgs that just half-ass it with low bar challenges, who seemingly accept that they're not capable of perfectly vetting a candidate.

[rat9988]

if you answer ""Well I would probably go home and work on my resume because that's a fool's errand." You probably are missing the wood and the trees.

[Quarrelsome]

and if you hire only based on solely on employee compliance then you are also probably missing the wood for the trees. I've worked in such orgs and they're extremely vulnerable to cargo culting.

[pibaker]

I think you missed the point in GP's post. Not all organizations optimize for problem solving. Some organizations prefer subordinates who follow orders (or better, is able to read the mind of the boss to decipher what order he is actually making) than those who breaks out of the box and says ”just use gsuite, boss."

[Quarrelsome]

sure but if its not a privately held business then using gsuite is better for the shareholders. Ultimately its the bosses choice, but for the board to fire them its worth knowing they were aware of being able to use gsuite instead of pissing away resource on a needless project.

[theli0nheart]

Most real-world scenarios aren't so arbitrary, and hardly any have a "right answer". If I had a candidate that broke out of the box of our interview to give a good answer, and that's not the answer I "want", I'd be more likely to believe the interview question is the problem, not the candidate.

[john_strinlai]

remember that we already did the "Excellent answer, that is what I would do as well, now what if we wanted to build it in-house?" part.

the "good answer" was already acknowledged, the "real-world scenario" answer was accepted.

the second part ("what if we wanted to build it in-house") is purely hypothetical to gauge how the interviewee would approach the specific technical challenge (shedding some of the "real-world" constraints so that the focus is technical).

if they again say "well that is dumb i would just use sheets", that is absolutely an interviewee problem.

[johnnyanmac]

Depends on the dyanmic. If you have an excellent candidate you're trying to poach, it becomes an intervewing problem because you're wasting both you and their time.

If they are a dime a dozen, then it becomes their problem. Whether or not they care it's their problem depends on their circumstance.

[mv4]

I also feel it's very easy for a good interviewer to bring the conversation back to the desired scenario.

Anything from "imagine we are in a parallel universe where Google Sheets has not been invented yet" to "how would you design a google sheets competitor" would do the trick.

Source: interviewed hundreds, incl FAANG.

[maccard]

Yeah - for sure. When I’m interviewing I want to give the candidate the best chance of success and to show off both what they know and how they will work with me.

I generally give it three goes with questions like these - the initial ask, and two clarifications. If we’re not getting anywhere I move on.

[johnnyanmac]

Depends on the dynamics here. Remember that an interview is 2-way.

Someone giving an answer like "that's a silly, unrealistic scenario" is more likely than not someone who isn't in need for that job to begin with. I'm sure it's something many wish they could say, because the interview pipeline can be very grating. But not everyone needs to play that game.

[munchbunny]

> The point of the question is to have something remotely understandable for both sides to talk about, that’s it.

I think a lot of people miss this point.

Real projects are complex and have tons of context at the historic layer, political layer, and technical layer. If I have one hour to do the interview, I need to get to some shared context with the candidate quickly, or else it'll just be an hour of me whining about my job. And I usually don't need someone who is already a senior subject matter expert, so I'm not going to ask the type of question that is so far down the rabbit hole that we're in "wheels haven't been invented yet" territory.

Fundamentally, that's why I'm asking a somewhat generic design question. I do also dig into how they navigated those layers in their past experience, but if I don't see them in action in some way then that's just missing signal I can't hire on, and that helps neither me nor the candidate.

In another company or timeline perhaps I could run a different interview style, but often you're working within the constraints of both what the candidate is willing to do and what the company standardized on (which is my current situation).

[AntiDyatlov]

I think the contrived scenarios you come up with need to not have a trivial solution. Everything about my brain is optimized for KISS, it breaks everything to turn down simple solutions to reach for something more complex.

[rudnevr]

did it ever occur to you that you might be living in a self-reinforcing feedback loop? how long ago have been in interviewee's shoes?

[docmars]

Think of it this way: they're paying you lots of money to build something boring that has a lot of prior art/research available to you for free. This could be the easiest money maker in your life.

It's not your problem they're hellbent on building a new wheel. They're willing to pay you!

Chances are, you've thought of your own pain points in whatever they've asked you to build and you've now got an opportunity to shine by solving them and demonstrate your expertise.

[pavlus]

There is a tool invented lately, that's very good for solving problems, that are well-researched and had been solved multiple times already. This tool is actually why there is a RAM shortage in the world right now.

Some even say, this tool will replace a lot of workers soon(sic!).

[johnnyanmac]

But if you're already paid lots of money to work on stuff you actually care about... why bother?

That's the goal of "fuck you" money. You go through the politics and pantomimes until you have the power to stop playning those games.

[docmars]

Very true, that's the goal at least! Founders may just learn the hard way until the right people tell them no.

[Tepix]

Setup Etherpad

[9rx]

"That does sound like something nice to have. However, recreating Google Sheets is a substantial undertaking. First, we need to evaluate the business case for duplicating something that already exists to ensure that there is a net benefit in doing so. Second, we need to determine if the business has sufficient capital to see the project through."

[rat9988]

There is a difference between being smart and acting smart.

[numpad0]

I think that's exactly the point being made. __Acting__ smart gets you paid, not being smart, and that's like, not ideal.

[rat9988]

I wonder how you get paid if you fail the interview.

[9rx]

You don't, hence why it pays to act smart.

[docmars]

I suspect a lot of businesses are going to make this mistake in the "SaaS is dead" era as companies try to eliminate $50k/mo subscriptions for boring business software, and they figure it's easier to burn AI tokens creating an internal solution they didn't plan on maintaining in the far future.

Funny times we're in right now.

[BurningFrog]

That's a good real world answer, but a terrible SWE interview answer.

[glaslong]

Indeed, the proper response is now to vibe code 14 semi functional gsheets clones in parallel

[johnnyanmac]

I guess nobody gets hired for simplicity either.

[BurningFrog]

The obvious way is to put the spreadsheet file on some shared network location.

You still need some "locking" mechanism so two people don't try editing at the same time.

Which again probably means Google Sheets is the best answer!