Comment by DangitBobby

Plenty of time to talk about your life and hobbies once hired. If I’ve got 45 minutes to make a recommendation based on an evaluation, I don’t want to base any of that on your relationship/family status or pets, I certainly don’t want to give the impression that maybe I did that, and therefore, I don’t want to spend any time talking about it in the interview.

I think that's something you acclimate into, as you get more comfort and familiarity with individual colleagues, and feel more safety -- not upon first entering an interview that our industry has turned into an adversarial, low-trust performance theatre and hazing.

Personally, I can still sometimes get a collegial, genuine interview, and it's great (people will speak candidly, and you get a much better sense of what it would be like to work there and with them). Because I know that style of interview exists, and I know what it's like. And I've been a high-ranked engineer with some street cred, so in some ways it's much easier for me to, e.g., understate or say I don't know something or speak very candidly, than it is for a junior. And I'm often willing to bomb the interview, if my prospective future colleague won't/can't interact like a colleague. A lot of people don't have that luxury/masochism.

You can talk about it at work, after you're hired, like with your coworkers. The company can't ask you about a lot of things in an interview without exposing them to a significant amount of legal liability.