> I was at a party tonight and someone asked me what my favorite book was. Couldn't answer. They relaxed the constraint and asked about "a good book". Couldn't answer. They relaxed the constraint again and asked me about "any book, good or bad". Couldn't answer.
From his blog, Dan is obviously a great engineer. I'd love to say as an interviewer I'd recognize this and say "strong hire". But I have no idea how to interview someone who gets this nervous. I've written "don't hire" in such cases before.
The attempts at making the problem easier completely miss the point of what makes it hard (for some people) to answer this kind of question. I do not associate books I read with the concept of a book, so there are no associations to follow so this kind of open question has a high chance of causing my mind to go completely blank.
As somebody in that twitter thread said:
> Yep, these are terrible questions, because they imply you are supposed to instantly trawl through your entire memory of years of work, and rank all the bugs (or whatever) and then pick the ONE TRUE EXAMPLE that will make you look good...
I find it much easier to talk about a reasonably scoped a topic where I have strong links between the facts I know about it.
The broader principle I'm seeing is, when it comes to competence, a small company is probably best off looking for reasons to accept, not reasons to reject. Small companies aren't subject to the same corruption-control constraints that large companies are, so they have more flexibility in onboarding someone who doesn't fit in one of the usual boxes but nevertheless can probably provide more than enough value to the business.
(Incidentally, the main reasons I'd reject an engineer candidate who did seem individually competent and motivated enough relate to trust and team collaboration.)
That's a good point. I work for a large, famous company, though. I'm expected to do a standard 45-minute interview with a prescribed focus area (most commonly system design or algorithms/coding) and to evaluate candidates in relatively standard ways.
If anyone has tips for putting a nervous candidate at ease in this situation, I'm all ears.
One thing that I think helps is that I ask markedly simpler questions than other interviewers often do. (We can see each other's notes.) This takes away some of the time pressure and lets the candidate and me go through requirements gathering, verbal/whiteboard descriptions of the problem/algorithm, and a few revisions of the code and debugging and such together if necessary. It also avoids the "candidates need to bring their own finer-tipped whiteboard markers to write the solution on the board" sorts of ridiculousness. It might mean I can't reliably tell the difference between "hire" and "omg best I've ever seen hire hire hire" based on the few lines of simple code a good candidate might ultimately write but I don't care about that.
If you have such crippling social anxiety that you cannot name literally any book, whether you've read it or not, and you can't even make one up, the odds of you performing well at an interview are extremely small.
I'm reasonably confident in at least half the interviews I do, and I might blank if I was asked about books, because somewhere in my 30s, I essentially stopped reading them. If you reminded me of something I'd read, I could talk about it, but nothing comes to mind any more because I'm no longer buying or reading books on a day-to-day basis.
Also, assuming one or more came to mind, maybe I'm paralyzed in an interview because I'm thinking about what the ones I can think of imply, whether they give away my age, or whatever.
It would be easy to talk about a book if I was warned ahead of time.
I'm not sure I even know where my copy is, but if I chose one book that I've read that more people should know about, it would be:
"You Don't Always Get What You Pay For: The Economics of Privatization" (Elliott D. Sclar)
But in an interview on the spot, I absolutely wouldn't have come up with that.
I managed to fail 11 or 12 onsites in a row over a 5 month period before landing my current job.
What I’d like to know is who these people they talk about later in that same thread who interview somewhere every month. Do people really do that? I’m wondering if _I_ should start doing that.
Lest you think he's just a superstar who doesn't care about interviews, he says he's quite bad at them https://twitter.com/danluu/status/1058029337923014656