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Comment by Freedom2 | Hacker News Reader

Last time I said "you shouldn't do X" in an in person interview, I failed and the feedback was "candidate was not cooperative with the interviewer".

So even if the candidate is not using an LLM, the interview process is so messed up now that people willingly go along otherwise they may be rejected for, you know, actually stating what their experience was like.

Funnily enough, that was a YC funded company that I was interviewing for, and I expected a lot better.

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Not sure how your delivery was, but maybe the best way is, “If I were doing it that way, here’s how I’d go about it. However, I might consider this other way and here’s why.”

In all honesty, my words were something along the lines of "I don't think that approach is a good idea. It's because of X reason."

Another viewpoint I've seen when sharing this story is that the interviewer wants me to start with the "bad" implementation first, then we move on to the "proper" one, but what's the point if I actually have pointed out the flaws beforehand?

there is also an aspect of interviewing the interviewer. if they get upset at the slightest hint of pushback, instead of saying something like: ok, fair point, but humor me, or you may be right, but i'd like to hear the solution anyways..., in other words if they are not able to look past the pushback and tell you what they want then maybe you don't want to work there anyways.

Sounds like you learned something valuable about them and dodged a bullet!

I won't disagree about it being messed up though.

That's very disappointing. As an interviewer the ideal situation I want in an interview is one where we are discussing tradeoffs. It allows the interviewee to show a deep understanding of the solutions we are discussing and, depending on the problem, even share insights around business impact.

I wonder if the pushback is more of a common reaction from more junior interviewers or once that aren't very empowered and just need to go down a script and worry about getting in trouble if they deviate.

Yeah it sounds like maybe OP was too direct. “Uncooperative” is strong language for feedback

I had a systems scenario recently where I was expected to troubleshoot a MySQL master that was trying to backup via rsync to a hung NFS mount.

I successfully resolved the problem and only then detailed how messed up their design was to get into such a situation in 2025.

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