
An open-source collection of interview questions - orthodoz
https://counter-interview.dev/
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Timberwolf
Perhaps drifting slightly OT, but this is a good example of why I'm not a fan
of the current trend to make the "any questions for us?" section of interviews
evaluative.

I get the theory, that good people ought to ask smart questions, but it feels
trivially hackable the same way all those stupid brain teaser questions from
'90s interview processes were. In other words, professional interviewees - the
kind of people who memorise answer books, question lists, etc. - will
outperform people who are smart and skilled but don't approach things in
exactly the way the scoring checklist expects.

(Bonus points if you penalise people for not asking about something which was
easily discoverable from Glassdoor, industry contacts or even your own company
website.)

~~~
shikoba
> the kind of people who memorise answer books, question lists, etc. - will
> outperform people who are smart and skilled

If people who just memorize can outperform smart people, it just means that
the one conducting the interview is not really smart, and so incapable of
recognizing expertise.

~~~
TopHand
As someone who has had far more failures at evaluating candidates than
successes, I find it very hard to wade through the BS in a meeting that lasts
an hour or two. The strangest people I've met seemed normal for that short of
time. I usually have to work with someone for up to six months to get a real
feeling of their ability to adjust to new situations, learn new technology,
and strength of work ethic.

~~~
shikoba
That's what I saw my whole life. People conducting interview don't know how to
spot BS and fraud.

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neilv
Their very first example question is "Do you use source control?", taken from
a year 2000 post of Joel on Software.

I think this is no longer a good question. (The answer will almost certainly
be the affirmative, and the person asking it might sound unaware.)

~~~
reubeniv
You'd think that, but some legacy systems might not have it, I don't want to
name and shame, but a lot of our code is on an IBM Series i (used to be called
as400?) and the source control for it is basically manually adding a comment
with the ticket number next to any changes - unsurprisingly they're a bit coy
about the technologies used in interviews and target people fresh out of uni
who don't know any better, my recruiter told me it was a Java role lol

~~~
avgDev
We've got as400 at work, surprisingly a lot of companies still run it.
Thankfully, I do 0 work on it and focus on other applications.

It is becoming a super niche market, once the dinosaurs die off, whoever can
come in and work on it will make bank. In fact my company is getting pretty
anxious about it, as the cost of even migrating from it is going to be high.

~~~
neilv
I've thought of doing a startup for that kind of problem: basically, we'd
partner-ish with one enterprise customer as a kind of skunkworks attempt to
migrate their legacy system to some other platform, at low cost, by leveraging
the language development and DSL facilities of Racket. We could hire some top
engineers _because_ we tell them we will pay them money to hack Racket. And we
keep rights to the Racket part. That first solution is biased to the first
customer -- the particular dialects/versions of language they use, other
software/facilities they use, their programming conventions and internal
libraries, and how they want to map to which new platform. The next enterprise
customer we go to, we have a lot less tooling work to do. After a few
iterations of that, we have either a semi-turnkey solution, or a proven
approach for our team of highly-paid consultants.

As a bit of evidence in support of Racket being a secret sauce for this, I'd
point to how ITA Software (before they were aquired by Google) leveraged Lisp
to integrate a new, modern node with the IBM legacy airline reservation system
network. They publicly stated that a Lisp was what made this effort viable.

(But doing a Web site or app is so much easier and less risky. VCs are set up
to give a site/app dotcom wads of money, and want to see you go through the
funding rounds and acquisition/IP. And the technical problems are usually
well-understood from the start, and it's just a matter of execution. And you
can pick a site/app idea that doesn't involve having to do difficult
enterprise sales courtships. Also, personally, given that I started working
young, so some of the dates on my resume cause my job applications to be
deleted instantly, I'm not anxious to be adding showstopper keywords like
AS/400 to my resume.)

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philshem
To make it really open, would be better if the collection was stored as Github
issues. Less shiny website but easier to add and no curation process (PRs may
be refused, aka censored)

~~~
Phenix88be
Not every open database should be on Github...

~~~
juhq
The content could be automatically mirrored to github issues or vice versa

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fooblat
It seems odd to me to call this "open source" when I can't find a statement of
license or copyright on the site (maybe I missed it?).

I would expect something like a Creative Commons license to make it clear what
can be reused and under which conditions.

~~~
plibither8
It's under MIT: [https://github.com/oleg-koval/counter-
interview.dev/blob/mas...](https://github.com/oleg-koval/counter-
interview.dev/blob/master/LICENSE.txt)

But yes, this should me more explicitly mentioned if they are advertising it
as "open-source".

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yoones
So now we have open source questions? Really? "open source" questions?

~~~
kissiel
Yeah, source as in text form, not some binary that your brain compiles those
letters into!

~~~
yoones
There's a difference between collaborative and open source. A collection of
interview questions can be qualified as collaborative, not open source.

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oysterfish
Wow tone down the design. What's going on here.

