Comment by sdenton4
18 hours ago
I fail to recall the exact wording of the discussion topics, but they were, in fact, non-technical — covering such lovely topics as the hardest day of my life, my biggest life challenges, and other similar “trauma-baiting” questions.
Ha, I don't think anyone who asks these questions expects that you'll respond in a fully unfiltered way... These kinds of questions are part and parcel of non-tech interview processes.
You can redirect with some subtlety "Well, my hardest ever day at work was..." to avoid talking about dead babies or whatever. Your interviewer doesn't get to look over your whole life history and determine whether your /truthfully/ chose the actual hardest ever day. So really it's a chance for you to say "Here's a [big] challenge I once faced, and here's how I survived/overcame it."
Yeah, OP just unwinded himself, no filter. You can be truthful and open with friends and family, close people to you. You absolutely shouldn't when talking with strangers.
Then strangers shouldn't fucking ask questions that could have answers that make them uncomfortable. Just a thought.
It's wild to see so many advocates of "the inexperienced should have experience already". You're put in an awful situation but it's your own fault because you went through it, you should have known better than to take questions at face value as presented.
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We weren't there, and the article is light on details, so we can only speculate. I see two options here:
a) The potential employer vastly overstepped commonly accepted boundaries.
b) It was totally implied that the questions were to be answered in the context of work. "What was the hardest challenge you had to overcome?" in that context relates to e.g. debugging a hard concurrency problem, not your divorce.
What stood out to me is that whatever interpretation is the correct one, the candidate was willing to give (apparently) deeply personal answers. That's just something to adjust for in upcoming interviews, we live and learn.
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They shouldn't ask such questions, but people also need to learn to push back against unreasonable behaviour too.
I think this is the case of "hey how it's going." In most cases what is actually being demanded of you is a bullshit answer.
OP took it at face value. I can relate.
Alternatively, the interviewer was a psychopath. (I can also relate!)
"How are you?" "How was your weekend?"
It is common for people to ask a personal sounding question but expecting an impersonal answer.
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This is what makes this a potentially (mostly) great interview. If the candidate can’t/doesn’t understand the dynamic of the interview and hates it, they opt out of the process.
Probably only thing I would’ve done differently would have been to limit first call to 30 minutes to save me time when someone is obviously a bad fit.
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But why ask about "the hardest day in your life" instead eg "the hardest day at work"?
Personally asking this kind of personal questions sounds very weird. You can evaluate soft skills and culture fit by asking more relevant, professional questions. Except if the reason to ask this kind of more personal questions was sth else.
Notice that the blog post author did not provide exact quotes. In fact, they explicitly state they do not remember the wording. It's very likely that they did, in fact, ask about biggest challenges, and the author misunderstood.
The cynic in me says because they want to select candidates whose work IS their life.
If they ask questions but expect fake, censored or cherry-picked answers, it says a lot about their culture.
Pro tip (for life, not only interviewing): never ask a question you don’t want to hear answer to.
You are technically correct. But you must admit it sounds pretty bad to say "Yeah, the idea of the behavioral technical interview is the interviewer asks questions that look like they admit honest answers, but you should actually lie to them, and they expect you to lie, and actually it's a charade you play with your interviewer, and if you don't understand this (which is never explained to you) then you will immediately be rejected."
I can definitely understand the perspective of someone who has done few interviews not understanding this and being upset/confused!
I paid for interview coaching at interviewing.io. This is the coaching I got about the behavioral interview:
- "There is no place for honesty in a behavioral interview. No one is going to check your story."
- Tell a story about a time when you got into a dispute, ideally with your boss, over a work-related issue, and you won the dispute.
- If you have no relevant story, I [the coach] will write one for you to memorize.
In fact, being able to "play the game" so to speak is probably part of what the interviewer is looking for.
It is also possible that they were trying to see, if the person had traumas that would interfere with their ability to work with toxic content, do red-teaming / etc tasks.