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One of my friends told me that when he was interviewed at his current company, they asked him a similar question, and he said he gave a long complicated answer that basically amounted to "I would google it."

He got the job, so there you go I guess.



Gotcha style questions like that pretty much just ask "have you been in the exact same scenario as me last Tuesday?"

My interviewing has boiled down to 30 minutes of shooting the shit to see what the person is like and to make them more comfortable and then a pair session with a ticket I haven't had experience with so we are both on approximately the same level.

My goal in the session is to see how they interact with an unfamiliar project and what kind of questions they ask and their discovery process of learning our business domain.


Your interview process is unfair.

1. The shoot the shit session is guaranteed to be driven by your personal biases.

2. Working on a different ticket with every candidate ensures you can't possibly compare one candidate's performance to another's.


Totes, but what interview is fair?

I also send the same screening test depending on role so I do have a baseline, although I'm much more interested in our interaction during the pair session.


I'd rather have an informal discussion that demonstrates competence than being quizzed on meaningless Googleable stuff[0].

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14570309


I said the same thing to an interviewer once when he asked me about the syntax of some Entity Framework command and he looked at me like I had cheese coming out of my mouth.

I didn't get the job, but I'm glad. His reaction was a red flag as far as I'm concerned.




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