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jjk166 18 hours ago

I have interviewed many people. I have never once been impressed by someone figuring out a convoluted way to force a round peg into a square hole. The people I recommend are the ones who question why I would want to do something. If need be, I can always follow up with "but what if you had to do it this way." But for a question meant to evaluate technical ability, I am going to ask you how to do something which is a best practice. If I'm asking you how you would solve an absurd problem, the purpose of the question is to evaluate how you approach problems, and I will let you know that's the purpose of the inquiry.

ajmurmann 18 hours ago | parent [-]

I'm with you on this as an interviewer but as an interviewee have had interviewers who clearly didn't like it when I did this or even started to get impatient when I called out different problems than they cared about. There is a really terrible feedback loop around interview expectations.

hinkley 14 hours ago | parent [-]

The worst question I've been asked recently was how to make something robust.

When I started running down the laundry list of footguns with the basic solution, he clearly became impatient. I never did figure out what he was after, but I worry for the team.