Hacker News Reader

Comment by hiAndrewQuinn | Hacker News Reader

Avoiding questions just because it depends on context might be a valuable way to signal to other people that you're careful and considerate, and that definitely has value.

But quizzes like this are explicitly designed to be contextless. You're supposed to answer with your gut feeling, the first step in the random walk.

Someone who actually depends heavily on context and doesn't have a strong preference either way will answer quickly, and end up near the center on all dimensions of interest - that's where I landed:

""" You value clarity and directness in code. You prefer explicit, step-by-step solutions that are easy to understand and debug, even if they require more lines of code. Abstract ↔ Concrete: -2 Concrete Human ↔ Computer Friendly: +5 Human-Friendly """

View on HN

Experienced engineers will have a gut feeling of ‘it depends’ and if there is no extra context given the question is pointless and any answers are useless.

It's not useless at all. We expect people whose answer to everything is "it depends" to answer more or less at random, when they don't have enough information to say otherwise.

That is an extremely telltale signature. Put another way, if your assertion is right, then a simple 5 minute quiz like this should be enough to rule out people who are claiming to be senior, but who actually arrive at extreme answers. A 5 minute quiz like that would be worth tens of millions in improving hiring practices.

So either we're all leaving millions of the floor by not building a company around this, stat, or your assertion is just wrong. There can indeed be senior engineers who are nonetheless very principled even in low-context situations.

It’s an easy 5 min screen at most and it’s common knowledge anyway which you can easily fake by answering ‘it depends’ and asking basically random questions. Good enough additional context turns the quiz into a systems design interview, which serves your purpose obviously.

> But quizzes like this are explicitly designed to be contextless. You're supposed to answer with your gut feeling, the first step in the random walk [...]

> Someone who actually depends heavily on context and doesn't have a strong preference either way will answer quickly, and end up near the center on all dimensions of intere

Which is basically all that this test is good for. If you're not somewhere around the center, you're either a junior dev or not a very good dev.

The analysis you quote smells of vapid pop psychology. What empirical evidence exists for supposing that the result is reliably objective, let alone relevant?

It should smell more like philosophy class 101 to you. "Either X or not X. If X, either Y or not Y."

I can point you to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth_table if you need empirical evidence that people sometimes actually think claims through sometimes for a few minutes. Otherwise I'm not sure what you're asking for.

A little later in the class, you'll learn that even completely false hypotheses can be logically consistent.

There is one question here, and you have failed to address it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com