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Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

We need your professor to coach interview candidates. On the "interviewer" side of the table, I can't tell you the number of times I've asked a question that should produce a quick, simple answer, and instead got a 5-10 minute stream-of-consciousness word salad out of the candidate. Or a huge run-on sentence this-and-that-and-this-and-also-that-oh-and-this... without coming up for air. It's so common, I must assume that these kinds of replies are being taught to candidates as some sort of best practice.

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I suspect many interviewers reward using a question as an opportunity to showcase knowledge though, even if it means rewarding that kind of expansive verbosity. I suspect the this and also that you allude to is the candidate not wanting to be called out for failing to mention a corner case or tradeoff. Of course, conversations are rarely legalistically constrained to answering only the precise letter of a question asked; it's a matter of degree.

Forgive a painful mixing of metaphors: if the Workplace StackExchange is anything to go by, one interviewer's flying colours are often another interviewer's red flags.

I'll add that, as an interviewer (whether of candidates or doing qualitative research), a pattern of very clipped responses to questions about experiences of various sorts soon makes me feel that I, as an interviewer, have suddenly become responsible for filling airtime. It should be a conversation even if that can involve sometimes going off on tangents.

> if the Workplace StackExchange is anything to go by, one interviewer's flying colours are often another interviewer's red flags.

This is absolutely true.

In /r/RecruitingHell, I recently saw a job seeker saying a hiring manager dropped them after they tried to connect on LinkedIn during the interview loop. Meanwhile, another HM in another loop praised them for it.

I think it's more likely a nervous candidate who may not be comfortable or experienced in conversation, as many introverted tech type people seem to be. I don't think it's being taught; it's more likely the result of the candidate not having had interview coaching at all.

Yeah, nerves plus the big question-mark of not knowing what the interviewer's actually looking for. One interviewer's perfect answer will be another's "red flag" (see this very thread, where directly and correctly answering the asked question apparently got you put in the "meh" bucket).

> On the "interviewer" side of the table, I can't tell you the number of times I've asked a question that should produce a quick, simple answer, and instead got a 5-10 minute stream-of-consciousness word salad out of the candidate.

Yup.

There's a fine line between giving a thorough answer and just vomiting up everything you know that's slightly relevant to the original question.

I do AppSec. If I'm interviewing a candidate, and I ask them what Cross-site Scripting is, then if at some point during their answer they bring up SQL Injection, that's a red flag.

This is what I've been told. The idea being that the questions are more like prompts, and you should go ahead and elaborate to show your knowledge? Of course sometimes a questions really is just a question.

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