Riddles have no place in job interviews

The objective arguments are sound, in my opinion. I don't care for the flippant insults like "assholery," but I'm a big boy, I can filter these out.<p>One thing to remember about interviewers that ask poor questions is that many such people aren't full-time professional interviewers. They are to interviewing as a marketing manager who does some Excel scripting is to programming. They are often repeating what they've heard or read or been subjected to, much as an inexperienced programmer tends to use whatever programming pattern was espoused in the last blog post he read.<p>A terrible interviewer may still be a wonderful person to work alongside, just as someone who performs poorly under the pressure of an interview may be a fantastic programmer once hired and working on an actual project.

Having spent the last year interviewing for jobs. It has become clear to me that companies have no idea that they're being interviewed as they are interviewing me.<p>Can't find a time to call me when I've given you 5 dates and times? Red flag.<p>Can't get my resume into the hands of the folks who are interviewing me? Red Flag.<p>Tell me it will be a week and it takes two? Red Flag.<p>Call me 30 minutes after the scheduled time and not apologize. Red Flag.<p>Tell me I'm a perfect fit for the job, then the HR person calls me 5 minutes later to say that they will not be moving forward with the interview process. Red Flag.<p>Set up a time to Skype call me, cancel hours before the call, send an email 2 days later saying the job was filled before my interview. Black listed<p>Tell me on the phone interview that I will be called in for the face to face, send me an email 2 weeks later saying the job was filled. Black listed<p>Delay the hiring process because you want to hire another position first. Red Flag.<p>I could go on, and all of this has happened in the last year.

I'm not sure the author understands the difference between a riddle and a logic problem, a riddle typically uses misdirection and veiled meanings to hide an answer while a logic problem is one that can be solve by applying logical analysis.<p>So for example "What has two heads, four eyes, six legs and a tail?" is a riddle because it's so open ended and relies upon linguistic trickery. On the other hand most bridge crossing problems are logic problems, you typically have a finite number of options and by deduction and logical analysis you can arrive at the correct answer (i.e the answer is not a trick answer).<p>The advantage of logic problems as opposed to domain specific problems is that they let you separate an individuals logical reasoning ability from their experience. When you're hiring you want to make sure that the person you're hiring can deal not only with more general problems of the type they've seen before, but also that they can deal with esoteric problems that are very specific to the nature of your product. And that's when the ability to reason logically becomes much more important.<p>Obviously if the candidate you're interviewing is already familiar with the logic problem you're presenting then you probably won't get much value from the candidates answer and you need to ask alternative questions to ascertain the same information.

I think this should be taken with a grain of salt, and I say this specifically for this crowd, who I've noticed more and more aren't the prospective founders and outliers that it once contained but young, inexperienced new-grads or almost-grads that are just getting into the business and think starups are a good option.<p>My advice, to be blunt, is this: Know your role.<p>It's all well and good to rail against these (frankly) really dumb hiring practices. A lot of us are in the position where we don't have to put up with this crap. Of course a lot of us are in the position where we aren't interviewing at all anymore. Simply saying "I did such and such in the past" or even better "I worked with so and so" is good enough for many of us to land nice cushy gigs. Such is the benefit of a reputation, and you will build one, one way or another, in whatever niche you are in, over time.<p>However, young Padawan, this is not you. Not now. You - like it or not - are simply a number on a job application. And discounting the few who are lucky enough to have completed a project that means something in your short lives, or to have the fortunate grace to share acquaintance (and high opinion) with someone the hiring person knows and respects, you are NOT "interviewing the company".<p>You are a nothing. And just like all the other nothings that come through the door, if you want to get noticed you need to find a way to stand out from the crowd. You will likely not always be a nothing, but right now, you are. And so, your lot in life is to jump through hoops and toe the line until you can start to stand on your own two feet.<p>Please don't take the approach that the interview is an equal transaction unless it actually is. I've 'not hired' far too many of you, to be honest. You'll know when the transaction is equal, and if you are asking the question, it isn't. That isn't to say you should take any offer that comes to you; just that you are in no position to be picky. And if you are bitching about interview questions, this is the position you are in.

I've noticed that more and more topics are being labeled as inappropriate in interviews for developers. I have heard complaints about interviewers asking candidates to complete short programming tasks, producing past code samples, doing a whiteboard exercise, completing a pairing exercise, and objecting to a wide variety of questions. I understand that highly experienced professionals may get frustrated by some lines of questioning, but it's getting to the point that programmers feel they should walk in with a resume and say 'Trust me, I'm good', and immediately get a job offer.<p>Keep in mind some interviewers will ask questions that they don't expect you to answer in order to learn something about you. Will you lie, admit not knowing the answer, describe how you'd find an answer, get frustrated and rant (as this author does with riddles), etc? It could reveal how you'd treat a customer or a co-worker.<p>Candidates obviously have the power to walk out or not interview with places that are going to be more rigorous (or transparent) in the process, but what many candidates are classifying as 'unreasonable' for interviews these days is becoming a bit too long a list.<p>I just published an article about this very topic <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5073791" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5073791</a>

First off I am not really pro riddle per say, however we do use some 'riddles' at my current employer.<p>1) Sometimes they can point out really big gaping holes in basic logic ability, for instance we ask about basic logic with the NAND gate riddle, we explain you can compose the common logical operations just using NAND. Ask the interviewee to construct NOT using NAND, usually if they have never seen anything like this, we walk em through it as a freebie... so now they have NOT and NAND, and we ask them to construct AND. How many Architects we have interviewed, with 10+ years of experience who could not logically figure out how to combine NOT and NOTAND to get a logical AND...<p>2) Second, we mostly dont actually care too much about getting the correct answers to the riddles. Its partially to look at the way person solves problems, but mostly its psychological. In software dealing with non tech, high level biz people, you get all kinds of bizarre requests. If you throw a hissy fit in the middle of an interview, or storm out because someone asks you a riddle... Are we to expect you to keep your head when the VP of Sales asks you for something 'crazy'?

The same can be applied to pre-interview screening problems as well. I recently send my resume to a company that was advertising on the Hacker New job board (I'm not going to say which company it was). They replied to my email telling me that in order to get to the next step in the process, I need to solve a problem and send them my code. They wanted me to send them a conway's game of life board that, after 1000 generations, could be converted to a GIF and would make up a black and white image they included in the email. Basically they wanted me to take their image, convert it to a conway game of life board, and then figure out how to calculate backwards game of life generations. Sounds to me like a fools errand. I deleted the email and never thought about it again. I have better things to do to fill up my free time. Maybe if they had me do something actually useful or meaningful...

This article reminds me to ask a pointless mind-bending riddle to each applicant just to weed out prima donna programmer types who can't handle a little mental poking and prodding during the course of an interview designed to see if he/she will be a good fit for spending a good part of his/her waking day with me every day.<p>If you're too "good" to shift contexts beyond regurgitating your work experiences or coding a for loop for a few minutes -- then I don't want to be stuck in a room with you when there's a lot of pressure to meet a customer commitment that could mean our livelihood.

Having been hiring developers, designers, and product managers for the better part of the last ten years ..... I agree.<p>I also hate the actual interview itself. So little time to try and learn something that for the most part cannot be learned in a high pressure, nervous, anxiety ridden situation (I realize I am also being interviewed, assessed, and reviewed). However, this is a different point altogether from what the author is discussing.<p>I do think it's great to try and understand how someone<p>1 - Problem solves 2 - Approaches asking questions, interacting with other people, etc<p>And quizes can <i>sometimes</i> be a way to figure that out.<p>I've just found that when using quizzes it's better to openly communicate with the person what you, the interviewer, are trying to better understand. I always pre-amble a quiz (if and when I do use one)<p>"hey, I'm going to ask you a question/quiz/riddle. It's important to note I could CARE LESS about the answer. I'm really looking to better understand how you would go about solving this. So please, make sure to walk me through your thought process and don't hesitate to ask me any questions along the way".<p>I also like to make it clear how it ties into what the person will be working on. For example<p>"the reason I ask, is one of the first projects you will be working on is ___________, so knowing how you approach nebulous problems will be important"<p>The best response I had to this is<p>Well, I might do X,Y,and Z, but to your real question, I have a great example, mind if I share that?<p>Also, this is just a data point. Going back to my second paragraph, I've never once "not hired" someone based on how well they think on their feet in an anxiety ridden, pressure filed, hour of their life in a room with total strangers.

It's funny to see that developers have so much leverage on the job market that you can read phrases like "don't hire this employer, you're better than that" and act like that's the most normal thing in the world. I guess it's time for having paid interviews again.

What falls into the riddle vs. "acceptable" role? In my mind, it's perfectly valid to ask, for instance, "Given a binary search tree, write a program to return all elements between a low and high." or "Write a program to return whether or not a given string matches a regular expression." Are these "riddles," as espoused by the article? Sort of: they do take some element of an "aha!" moment to solve, whereas the "recommended" questions were mainly just domain-knowledge questions. But if you solve these problems using convoluted coding techniques, then I as an interviewer would be really worried that you'd muddy our codebase unnecessarily, and if you can't see how to solve them, I may discover that you have a problem thinking recursively, or logicing through complex issues. Or, I may find that you tend to dive into a problem before thinking about it and designing your solution. All of these seem fairly relevant to any job, and I've actually turned down employers that asked me too many "domain-knowledge" questions and not enough "how do you think about things" questions, because I don't want to be somewhere where I'm just expected to "know" the answer.

Riddles, logic puzzles, "write some code on the whiteboard" ....<p>It took me years to realize that these are <i>not</i> tests of technical ability, they are tests of <i>submissiveness</i>.<p>For example, if you are being interviewed by someone at the same level as you for some position -- and they pull such crap -- now you know how low their expectations of the employer are.<p>And if you are being interviewed by someone fairly senior relative to the position -- and they ask you such BS interview questions -- you can be <i>damn sure</i> that they themselves would laugh at and walk away from any interviewer that did that to them.<p>So when you give the clever answer and wait for your gold star... you've established your place in the order of things.

To me interviews are like weddings. High expectations and not enough practice - a great setup for some memorable mishaps.<p>I'd just offer the following from lots of experience on both sides.<p>- Make sure to write down a sample input and output. Sounds simple, but is often not done and the cause of a lot of wasted time.<p>- After you're on the same page about the input and output, allow for a minute to think. Silence should be perfectly okay here.<p>- Always discuss the strategy and various options before implementing the solution.

I tend to agree with the author, but there are indeed some things you can infer from the type of response you get. I have a friend who was doing a technical interview, and things seemed to be going weird. It seemed that the candidate knew the answers to most of his questions, but when pressured further he couldn't come up with alternative solutions. It was like those people who know the motions of math, but don't understand what it's for.<p>So he decided to ask one of these riddle questions: "How many hairs does a dog have?" and the candidate answered that it depended on the dog. So far so good. But then he started rambling: "Well, if it's a dog from the street, the dog might have scabies, and thus this dog has less hair.<p>Of course, this is a perfectly valid answer, but it is the failure of applying math/statistical thinking into his answer what was telling.<p>Now, I'm sure some people are thinking "that's anecdotical evidence" and it is, but what is the alternative if your intention is to hire mathematically inclined candidates?

Riddles are useless interview tools. When I am building a new dev team or adding to an existing one, I care about two things:<p>1. Did the candidate make a critical contribution to a piece of technology that I respect. I will start by asking them for examples of this in a lot of ways including asking them to present something they're proud of to the team. I will not rest until I have verified they did this through my network and back references.<p>2. Is their chemistry compatible with the team, or as it is more popularly put today, are they a good culture fit? That opportunity to present to the team is an important test. Another one is that the interviewing team has to catch them out being wrong about something and then see how they react to that. You can learn a lot about how someone deals with learning they're wrong about something. Lastly, we look for opportunities to socialize with the candidate. They can't be a good culture fit if nobody wants to spend non-work time with them.

Interviews are a two way street, but in any negotiation there's different leverage. Most of the time, in the current job climate, the interviewer is the one with the leverage over the employee.<p>For many people, a job interview ends up being "how much crap am I willing to put up with to make a living wage" and whether the interviewer (who may not even be someone you will ever work with again if you're hired) asks stupid riddles might factor very little into the equation.<p>I think this article would be better suited if it targeted the interviewers to say "Look guys, asking riddles is pointless and might turn off the best candidates who /can/ afford to fire you and look for another company to interview with."<p>On the other hand, you might consider whether you actually even want an employee who is willing to abandon the whole enterprise when they realize that an interviewer has the NERVE to ask them to solve a riddle or logic puzzle.<p>Like raganwald said, the interviewer is probably not the best interviewer, and you can decide whether you want to work with him and make the best impression. Or you can decide that you will only work under the strictest of conditions, and if someone asks you a question you don't like, that you may as well just walk out of the room right then, because they're obviously an braying alphadog assholey jackass.<p>If I was conducting an interview, and felt like asking a riddle like the article ("Four people want to cross a bridge. They all begin on the same side. You have twelve minutes to get all of them across to the other side. It is night. There is one flashlight. A maximum of two people can cross at one time"). If my candidate just said, calmly, and without agitation "Heh, you know, I'm not really good at on-the-spot logic problems like that. I don't know how long it takes for a trip anyways. But 4 people, weird restrictions, would probably take more than 4 and less than 4^2 trips." I would get a lot more out of it than if they blurted out a correct answer.<p>On the other hand, I'd probably learn a lot if they slammed their hand on the table, called me a braying asshole and stormed out of the interview.

It makes me want to ask an interviewer to code a solution to fizzbuzz or solve a riddle.

The worst company I ever worked at (now out of business, fortunately) had an interviewer / hiring manager who asked these sorts of riddles.<p>He also had a really thick accent. Later, he also proved to be technically incompetent.<p>I quit after 6 months.

Surely all of these arguments boil down to balancing how important general intelligence vs domain expertise is to your hiring procedure.<p>You could see these riddles as a stand in for just giving the candidate a full blown IQ test.

Towards the end of the interview the interviewer told me, "your turn to ask me questions". I said, "I have this puzzle for you...". He turned pale for a moment and then laughed at the joke. I wasn't joking.

This is not a trivial career so why trivialize it? I'm more keen on seeing a person's past work or hearing about their experiences. Asking them how they've solved past problems and how they've faced past conflicts gives me insight into if we can start working together. That's all an interview is. There's no guarantees it will all work out and I believe no amount of interviewing techniques will change that.

The best question was asked by Steve Jobs: "How do you re-invent the phone?"<p>All of you smartasses hiring with your riddle questions couldn't answer that.

I keep my interview questions in my "github résumé": <a href="https://github.com/nerdfiles/R-sum-/blob/master/q/to-startups.markdown" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/nerdfiles/R-sum-/blob/master/q/to-startup...</a><p>I recently had a headhunter e-mail me, offer no job description, but directed me to the website of the company, which makes iOS/iPhone apps. Two hours later he pinged me again asking if I read his previous e-mail.<p>Nowhere in my many online résumés do I say I have iOS experience or that I am even interested in that kind of work. Moreover, I stress, emphasize, my interest in hypermedia and W3C Standards.<p>This market is saturated with mismanagement, and there is a clear bottleneck. So, for instance, "hypermedia." Most developers and "techs" I mention this term to obviously have no idea what I'm talking about. And just entertain the fact that I made some jargonish sounding word, thus giving me the benefit of the doubt.<p>But now I cannot find work I want to do because hardly anyone knows what hypermedia is, and that is _not_ my fault. I'm staying abreast with my industry, and now I am suffering for it.<p>There is a bottleneck here, as with most "recruitment" industries. I don't even want to begin thinking about open source typography, with all the Microsoft Web Safe Fonts flying around.

I think there is some value in trying to see if a person can have a Columbus moment. After all the simplest solutions are hard to find. And it is nice to see how a person deals with problem outside his domain of knowledge. We don't want to hire someone that can have a nickname like Complicator or Rube Goldberg. But the questions must be rooted in reality. The correct answer to how much a Boing weights is check the manual.<p>Аsk them how to minimize datacenter flooding or how to lift fuel 20 floors upwards with no pumps working - that were real things that real people had to solve just a few months ago. And they weren't hired for that.