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Comment by hirundo | Hacker News Reader

> In other news, the famous interview question "what would you say is your greatest weakness" reveals that most people's greatest weakness is actually not very bad, and could even be spun as a positive.

I think that question survives not because it plumbs the candidate's greatest weakness but because it shows how gracefully they can walk a tightrope. Same for the Thiel question.

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I think that question survives because most interviewers are too lazy to come up with original insightful questions. Leading a good interview is hard and most employees treat it as a chore instead of a skill.

I heard that question for the first time during an interview recently and the entire conversation felt hostile. It felt like the interviewer was doing everything possible to find fault with me, and had very little interest in discovering my strengths (there was a lot more to it than just that one question). It was enough to make me think I should work somewhere else, despite loving everything else about the company.

It survives because around 15% of candidates, in my experience, say mind-blowingly dumb things that make it easy to say no.

As an interviewer, this is one of my goals - to hunt for easy filters.. the social version of a FizzBuzz test.

So your goal is to filter people who say dumb things answering a dumb question??

This. Too many interviewers treat the interview as a hostile test rather than a conversation. They often sound annoyed that they even have to give an interview. Even when I have enough connections to avoid the regular interview gauntlet I always choose to participate as it tells me a lot about the company culture. A series of bad interviewers asking dumb or lazy questions is enough to make me want to work elsewhere.

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