Comment by slurgfest | Hacker News Reader

Comment by slurgfest | Hacker News Reader

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It's a pressure question, a kind of interrogation. If you are honest, you will realize that you have a ton of things wrong with you and it isn't all that meaningful to pick the "worst" one.

People have been asking this for so long that it really only gauges whether the applicant canned an answer to it which sounds bad enough that you won't think it's bullshit, but good enough that they aren't hurting their application. As with other interrogation techniques you often aren't selecting against lying, but just for plausible lying that you are unequipped to detect. It is certainly an illusion that you are selecting for honesty this way.

If you do want to hire honest people, and it isn't for an area like sales where it is important for them to project unrealistic levels of self-confidence, you will cause less needless anxiety and get more actionable information if you can get specific on what sort of disclosure you need, rather than just asking the applicant to incriminate themselves in the worst way they can imagine.

If you want to punish people with ability and integrity but lower self-esteem then this question is your ideal instrument.

Fair points, but we do disagree, I think.

The "worst" part of the question is the worst part. I talk to people about "one" weakness. I also ask for how they are trying to improve, which is actually the key part of the question to me.

This is not intended as a pressure question. The point is not to learn about a weakness so I can disqualify an applicant. If people ask this question in the hopes that an applicant will incriminate himself, they're doing it (interviewing) wrong. I think this misperception about the intent of the question is what drives a lot of the fuss about it.

I think an interview process that is focused on filtering only people who aren't bad enough to obviously reject is going to net a company a lot of bad hires. You're right, plausible lying can be difficult to distinguish from truth. But the kind of hire I'd like to make is one who can speak fluently and with clear honesty about an area where he/she would like to improve.

To your last point: really don't think this is fair. If an applicant isn't comfortable with discussing a single weakness without feeling totally compromised, then I'm truly sorry, but their poor self-esteem is likely to get in the way of co-workers being honest with them. I say that as someone not characterized with excessively high self-esteem.

I hate to point this out, but you just asked "Why do people hate the greatest weakness question?" after scrolling through a long and and very reasonable list of reasons why people hate this question.

You also said people who don't answer the question directly are lazy and dishonest. Now I must ask, do you list a glaring disinterest in the perspectives of others among your own weaknesses? If not, does that make you lazy and dishonest?

> Now I must ask, do you list a glaring disinterest in the perspectives of others among your own weaknesses? If not, does that make you lazy and dishonest?

This this really bugs me. You needn't ask at all; it was your choice to make an ad hominem attack.

We merely disagree about the utility of an interview question; I think it's revealing and you don't. You're offended because I've said that I think failing to answer this question well may be indicative of personal flaws. That's the position of anyone who uses this question, not an attack on any poster here, most of whom disagree with me.

If you want to sit in an echo chamber, go somewhere else.

Edit: Not sure why I've been downvoted. Feel like this was a pretty moderate response to someone who directly and personally insulted me.

Easy, tiger. My point is that anyone who thinks this question is a fair and reliable way to suss out character flaws should think twice.

Again, what you did (asking a question when the answers were right in front of you) indicated that you neither knew or cared enough to actually read what others were saying. I promise you, this is not a good look. Disagreeing with the answers is one thing. But behaving as though they don't even exist is another. And given what we're discussing, this obliviousness is entirely relevant to the conversation in that it demonstrates that people aren't necessarily aware of their own shortcomings, at least not to the point where they can enumerate them crisply, completely, and professionally. Even a modicum of self-awareness (which you seem to lack) should make this clear.

And no, this observation doesn't constitute an ad hominem attack. Were the personal factor irrelevant (e.g. "How could we trust you with the company's finances? You're a woman!") then it would be. But that's because it introduces a logical fallacy (thinking women, by their nature, can't handle finance), not because it's disparaging. There's no rule of debate that says people can't say things that are true simply because it could cause others to take offense. As long as things they're saying are accurate and relevant, they're fair. That's why saying "We can't trust you with the company's finances. You're a convicted embezzler!" is not an ad hominem attack, even though a person's character is clearly the subject. Given the circumstance, character is entirely relevant. Indeed, it would be illogical NOT to mention it.

Now, it should be clear that there is nothing irrelevant about an overlooked weakness that exists in a speaker who is busy arguing that people who are unprepared to discuss their weaknesses are either lazy or dishonest. Obviously, you'd be unprepared to discuss your own weakness if you needed to, and not because you're lazy or dishonest. It's because you're human, just like the rest of us.

The problem with humans is that a lot of them are stupid. They ask stupid questions and draw stupid conclusions from the answers they receive. Smart people learn to identify the stupid ones fairly swiftly, and after having been burned by stupidity, they learn to evade it when necessary.

Few questions telegraph stupidity more reliably that "Tell me about your weakness?" You may think it's a great question, but as we've seen, you rank fairly low on the self-awareness scale and your idiotic judgements about people who are uncomfortable with it ("Lazy unprepared liar!") just confirms smart people's deepest fears about what goes on inside the heads of people who think this question is a great way to get reliable information.

Holy tortured reasoning (riddled with insults), Batman! Do you actually believe any of this?

I like how you ignore where I respond to a prior comment, describe the commenter's arguments as fair, and then address them one by one. Maybe you notice where I don't insult the guy who disagrees with me? You've now written 500+ words of arrogant moralizing premised on a single rhetorical question which you intentionally misconstrued.

> Now, it should be clear that there is nothing irrelevant about an overlooked weakness that exists in a speaker who is busy arguing that people who are unprepared to discuss their weaknesses are either lazy or dishonest.

In point of fact, it is clearly irrelevant.

Let's be honest: like everyone, I surely have many failings I am blind to. Probably these including massive, debilitating personal failures. And still, I am aware of at least some of my many flaws, and I'm willing to talk about how I am trying to improve with an interviewer. Perhaps not the weaknesses which you would impute to me, but other ones.

The question is not to correctly identify an applicant's greatest weakness (how would the interviewer verify this?), or for the applicant enumerate every weakness. It's to discuss one weakness. So whether I'm oblivious or idiotic or anything else you call me has nothing to do with anything, except as an expression of your own incoherent anger.

Rest assured, I was neither ignoring nor overlooking anything.

Here's what you said up top: "Why do people hate the greatest weakness question? I have never minded receiving it, and I often ask people the same."

After receiving an answer, your story changed a little. Now it was about "one" weakness. And a bit further down, you complete the reversal by asserting that asking about the greatest weakness is pointless, since people's answers can't be verified.

So you often ask a question you don't ask because it's silly. Got it.

I think what this exchange demonstrates is that you don't need to explicitly ask "what's your greatest weakness" to get some idea about the problems you may encounter in working with an individual. Indeed, you can get solid information about a person from a conversation about the whether if you're paying close enough attention to what they actually say. Conducting the interview at a restaurant and watching how they treat the waiter is an especially good way to to get a reliable quick-read. Observations like these won't tell you who is perfect for the job, but they will tell you who is to be avoided.

The key to these revealing moments is that the person you're considering isn't feeling on the spot at the time. That's why anxiety-producing questions are so unproductive. The interview situation provides enough nervousness on its own. Far better to relieve some of that pressure, allow people to be themselves, and just see what happens next.

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