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Comment by derwiki | Hacker News Reader

Advice for new questions: instead of contrived ones, pick a problem you've actually encountered in your job and ask the candidate to solve it. I've never had to implement a datastore like this -- so unless that's what you're actually doing, it doesn't seem particularly relevant. Another plus is that if you're doing interesting work, you have an almost endless supply of questions to choose from. Candidates also seem to respond better when you wrap up the question with "this is something I actually worked on a few weeks ago."

FWIW, Ning turned me down back in April 2008 so feel free to ignore my advice :)

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Asking relevant questions at an interview is a good idea, but I've noticed that a lot of technical interviewers ask questions it took them weeks to understand and fix when they use this approach. Understanding a problem is often more difficult than solving it ... knowing that the interviewer understands the problem and constraints is even more of a challenge.

I once had an interviewer give me the kobayashi maru without telling me. I thought the guy was a jerk. He could just have pulled a gun on me and demanded my wallet if he wanted to judge my personality. I declined the second round.

Can you describe your kobayashi maru question? I'm curious.

Yeah, but it wasn't technical. The point of the question was to assess my entrepreneurial IQ, or so I was told after. Generally if an unemployed person's applying for a job, their entrepreneurial IQ is low at the moment and they need money. Nevertheless: I was to acquire a desk to work at, which needed to have certain dimensions for under a certain dollar figure. The internet is down, the local office supply company doesn't have it, etc, etc, until I'm starting to think the interviewer is nuts. OK, I'll sit on the floor. His point was that you need to generate options, which isn't bad advice. But it was a dumb interview question.

Very dumb question, indeed.

The point of the Kobayashi-Maru test isn't to test whether they're capable of passing impossible tests, it's to test their character facing death. If you're choosing fellows to go to war with, you want to choose ones that won't shit their pants or otherwise make your last moments alive together awkward.

That's great for Star Trek. I'll keep interviewing technical candidates on a technical basis.

Perhaps the interviewer wanted to see if you could think up something like http://glinden.blogspot.com/2006/01/early-amazon-door-desks.... - and in the process test your willingness to be in an environment with such jury-rigged solutions.

the kobayashi maru isn't the impossible question itself. The kobayashi maru here is the situation of the jerk asking you the stupid question.

Remember the "unwinnable" test in the recent Start Trek movie that kirk wins by cheating?

You can look up the Star Trek reference, but in an interviewing context, it refers to an question that is essentially impossible to answer and/or basically never occurs in real life and yet is somehow meant to judge a candidate's ability to "think outside the box" or under extreme pressure.

As well as, of course, to showcase the interviewer's vast wealth of experience and keen insight into the human condition that enables him/her to assess as much in 5 minutes from candidate's response to a completely contrived question.

Maybe the test was how you react on this.

It was, but if you can show me a person that deals well with failure then you've shown me a CEO or saint.

I feel the same way about little puzzles that companies like to present to the candidates, especially the ones with a "trick" answer.

I never worked in a place where I had to solve tons of small little puzzles all day, or have to memorize a set of obscure language features, and can't look them up online if I need to.

As you said, the best interviews are the ones by a white-board, working together to solve something resembling a real problem. Because, eventually that is what I will end up doing if I work there.

As someone who was recently on the job market, I will say I wish more employers did this as well. As a candidate it gives you much more information about what you will actually be doing at the company too. There is just as much buzzword packing in job descriptions as there is in resumes these days and sorting through the interesting from non-interesting jobs is not always easy.

True. During my latest interview, Heroku asked me to design a billing/invoice system. I won the position and my first assignment was to work on the billing / invoice system. When I have the opportunity of conducting an interview, I will most certainly use this approach.

I truly apologize in advance - this is not meant to be flame bait or anything of that nature - but it bothers me when someone states they "won" a position. The interview process should be used to find a good match, both for the company as well as the candidate. When I am interviewed I am evaluating the company as well and will have no reservations turning them down if I feel I wouldn't be a good fit. If I have to win to get in to the company, then that alone would make me back off and possibly lose interest in the company.

Upvoted. Just for once, I'd like for an interviewer to present a question that they themselves don't know how to solve (or didn't know how to solve in the first few times they thought about it).

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