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Comment by vidarh | Hacker News Reader

Same here. Some of my goto questions are questions I don't expect a solution to. I'll tell people that - I know some people use similar questions without telling candidates that, but I don't think the extra pressure is necessary. I also explicitly explain to people that what I want to see is how they think, more so than the final solution.

It tells me a lot about how a candidate will work within a team if they're capable to actually bounce ideas back and forth and explain their thinking, and I've often preferred someone who doesn't get as far but who can show me better communications skills and who seems eager to learn.

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Huge +1 on explicitly setting expectations. I've written on this topic[0], and there are a lot of different ways interviewers don't set expectations:

- Is the interviewer looking for syntactically correct code, or general algorithmic skills?

- For a warmup, is the interviewer looking for a basic solution, or an optimal solution?

- For architecture walkthroughs, what level of detail is expected?

The extra pressure is definitely unnecessary.

[0] https://hiringfor.tech/2020/03/02/are-you-asking-candidates-...

I've found you can somewhat mitigate it by asking questions yourself. For example in one tech screen once I had the algorithm pretty much done I asked if I should look to optimize and to add test cases/handle odd input and the interviewer said it's fine as is and let's talk more about other topics like architecture in the real world.

Absolutely, that's something I pointed out in my writing: if the interviewer doesn't explain their expectations, you can and should ask. Interviews work best when both parties are engaged heavily in the success of the interview.

On the other hand, I go through months where half my job is devising ways to extract requirements from users who just want me to "make this problem go away"! I consider it very reasonable to test someone's ability to work out what problem they're meant to be solving.

You know what your job is: to figure out the problem. And the interviewer should be clear they are looking for you to figure out the problem to solve.

I'll keep these in mind.

I like to ask open-ended questions. "I am trying to solve X problem, how should-I do it?". That reduces the rote bias and also checks if the candidate can communicate.

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