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Comment by sanderjd | Hacker News Reader

I disagree. I used to be this gripe-y person, but the more experience I gained, the more I realized that everything is just the result of its trade-offs and started finding the griping both boring - who wants to complain constantly for years and years? - and less productive than maintaining more of an anthropologist's mindset.

So to me, constant griping is more of a not-that-much-experience signal.

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This is the most important question I ask in every interview. The goal isn't to get someone to piss and moan about every little thing, it's to see if they can identify any downsides to the tech they use. IME >80% of candidates have never even thought about it, treat every tool/dependency as free, and whatever tech they happen to use was written by the second coming of tech Jesus and contains no faults.

It's a great direct question. However, what I read was that this person asks candidates broadly about X technology and expects them to divine the knowledge that they need to start complaining about X if they want a job.

When a job interviewer asks about X technology, often they actually _want_ to see you hedge your bets. They think of this in terms of you understanding both the upsides and the downsides of technology (and business) decisions.

I aim to answer by listing: a high-level business benefit of X, a time I saw X delivering such a benefit, a time I saw X being a hindrance or failing to completely deliver the purported benefit, something an alternative of X does differently and why, then wrap up with a conclusion that the benefits are situation-dependent.

Fair enough. Perhaps I have a blind spot due to always having been the opposite kind of person. But I dunno, I'm not sure I've ever run into one of these "second coming of tech Jesus" types of candidates. Maybe that sort of perspective is more common in the bay area? I definitely sense a bit less ... cautious skepticism when I talk with silicon valley type folks.

Agreed, I wouldn't want continual moaning, I'd like to hear about the problems they experienced, and have the knowledge that on a different platform/framework that would be better, but you'd give up something.

I agree, I think it's better to ask what some of those trade offs are. What's this tech good or bad at? I'm not gonna complain about a language feature that I can't do anything about. I'm gonna implement the work around and move on. What's the point in sitting around and complaining? I can't alter the language itself and it would be unreasonable to change the project language past a certain point.

Reading into how Javascript was created clarified that the "issues" with the language were. I understand the creators(who are probably far smarter than I) chose to make things that way for a reason. I can often just google these reasons "Why does X language do this?" and understand. Any time I think "This seems silly..." there's a reason for it.

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