Comment by gwbas1c
15 hours ago
> If a member of my team actually proposed building a bespoke system for something that can be straightforwardly done in a spreadsheet, we'd be having some conversations about ongoing maintenance costs of software
All interviews are contrived / artificial situations: The point is to understand the candidate's thought processes. Furthermore, we're getting Bilsbie's (op) take on the situation, there may be context that the interviewer forgot to mention or otherwise Bilsbie didn't understand / remember.
Specifically, if (the hypothetical situation) is a critical business process that they need an audit log of; or that they want to scale, this becomes an exercise in demonstrating that the candidate knows how to collect requirements and turn a manual process into a business application.
The interviewer could also be trying to probe knowledge of event processing, ect, ect, and maybe came up with a bad question. We just don't know.
Given that Bilsbie can't read their interviewer's mind, there's no way to know if that's what the interviewer wanted, or if the interviewer themselves was bad at interviewing candidates.
> The point is to understand the candidate's thought processes
The problem is that this is a 2-way street. The candidate is forced to guess the interviewer's thought process, because otherwise they may be pitching over the interviewers head.
We have to spend a ton of time calibrating hiring loops for this, because otherwise you get staff level candidates being failed by mid-career interviewers who don't understand the full context of the question they are asking (and hence don't understand why a staff eng solves it differently than they would).