I recently remembered something that happened when I was being interviewed for my current job, back in 2004: I think three different interviewers all asked me the same technical question. I don't remember offhand what the question was, but let's say it was something about functional programming.<\/p>\n
I came away from the interviews convinced that the company was weirdly obsessed with functional programming. If they didn't care a whole lot about it, then why would they have asked about it repeatedly? It must be one of their most important concerns.<\/p>\n
Months later, after being hired and learning how interviewing worked at this company, I figured out that it had been pure coincidence. There was a list of suggested questions to ask, and three of the interviewers just happened to pick the same question from the list, and although there was sort of a process in place to avoid repeating questions, that process didn't work very well.<\/p>\n
I kinda feel like this is just one instance of a larger point: as with the practice of rejectomancy, it's very easy to over-interpret when trying to understand why interviewers are doing what they're doing.<\/p>\n
Another example: For a long time, one of my standard questions when I was interviewing tech writer candidates was about how they deal with difficult engineers. Eventually I noticed that I kept feeling the need to explicitly note that that's not actually a problem that I run into much around here. And I realized that asking that question was probably leading candidates to assume that there were a lot of difficult engineers around and that we needed to make sure they could handle that. So I stopped asking about it.<\/p>\n
(Written in October 2015, but not posted 'til now.)<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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