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Comment by sofal | Hacker News Reader

Are you saying that the context and type of the problem in the interview doesn't matter at all?

I think you'd understand how I can take your argument to its extreme conclusion and justify posing psychotherapy problems to candidates.

You're seeing complaining where there isn't any. It's in the employers interest to ask questions that will narrow down candidates in a way that best fits the job. Putting candidates under extremely unusual circumstances and pressure to answer unrelated questions is only going to help you know how the candidate responds to unrelated questions under extremely unusual circumstances, and pointing this out is not complaining. Acknowledging that a high pressure phone interview does not accurately reflect your abilities is not complaining either.

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Are you saying that the context and type of the problem in the interview doesn't matter at all?

I think it doesn't matter if it is consistent for all the candidates. A company can't change to suit every employee. Working for a startup like Youtube is high pressure. You have to be very self-aware and able to work under extreme circumstances. When your app crashes and millions of people are angry, you have to fix it! You can't create a special case scenario for your employees because they need to work in a stress free environment.

Of course that is a simple case, but high stress engagements occur at some point in almost every environment and how the candidate reacts to the high stress is very important, perhaps the most important.

IMO, it is more important for the employee to adapt to the environment than for the environment to adapt to the employee. Every candidate is going to want questions asked a different way. Every candidate is going to want their cube to be a different color -- that's why they are all gray or beige.

My point is, if you want A players on your team, you will be well served to waste as little time as possible on candidates that want you to ask them interview questions the way the candidate wants them asked and focus your attention on candidates that correctly answer the questions how the interviewer wants to ask them.

This is not a question about whether an interviewer needs to customize the questions for each interviewee. This is about a possible mismatch between the environments of the interview versus the workplace and the relevance of the questions to the actual job.

You make a case for developers needing to be able to handle "high stress" or "high pressure" conditions. Those are pretty broad terms, as they could mean anything from "very competitive and high standards" to "quick firefighting emergency work 24/7" to "your boss will micromanage the living hell out of you". So, in effect, you're saying, "Look, you complainer, working for YouTube is like being in a phone interview all day." All I can say is that if that is true, I am certainly not a match.

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