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Comment by Roark66 | Hacker News Reader

Personally I really dislike very specific questions you can Google an answer to in 3s and consequently no one remembers it while doing an actual job. IMO when it comes to verification of actual technical ability the candidate should be told an example of an actual task she/he would be expected to complete routinely and they should either do it during the interview or explain how would they go about doing it.

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One question I asked recently was "what is the `with` statement in Python for?" If they ask for clarification I'll mention related terms like "context management" and "RAII", which we could discuss without Python syntax.

Yes, they can Google the answer in 3s.

Yes, I could also ask a long-form question about how they would approach wrapping an IO interface in Python.

But if they don't understand `with` or resource/context management, the chances that they would produce a reasonable answer to the long-form question are tiny. They will produce an answer anyways, and it will likely be a waste of time. So we cut to the chase and target the core concepts directly.

I get what you mean I think. However if you’ve been doing C dev for several years and you “don’t remember” what a static variable is and when to use it (or not) is not a great sign. Cumulative signals is what determines hire or no hire, not a single “wrong answer”. Even when a candidate doesn’t know an answer you can get useful signals. If you give them the answer or hints and see how they react or a follow up question after giving them the answer.

You can google many things easily. Understanding the answer and knowing how to apply it to different problems matters a lot more. I still expect some concepts and definitions to be remembered if you’re claiming expertise in a topic.

Static variable sure but there are many other examples, like returning a C fixed-size array from a function. I had this question asked and they specifically insisted on being compliant with the standards and not using an out-argument. This is a ridiculous question.

> they specifically insisted on being compliant with the standards

that's wrong?

No, but this is a very niche thing to know and if I remember correctly gcc has a widely used specific extension for that which would not be accepted in that case.

Being pedantic about standards and expecting people to recite them perfectly as a way to assess skill or seniority is what is wrong. Even when you are implementing a 'standard' there's room for robustness principles (liberal in what you accept, strict with what you send) that should be weighted instead of blindly following a 'standard'.

Agreed. I’ve been doing C development for the last 10 years and I’ve never seen that. I would have put it inside a struct and returned that.

I hate those types of trick questions.

I guess my point is that what you really dislike are niche pedantic gotcha questions, not 'very specific questions you can Google an answer to in 3s'. I fully agree with that btw.

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