[mmkhd]

The author is talking about hiring interviews like it’s some kind of multiple choice test. Interviews should be more like essays. Of course it is not that important that the interviewee knows the exact definition of ACID but they should certainly know what it is about. Knowing about ACID and the problem space it comes from enables people to think about problems that let to the ACID concept as a solution to said problems. It shows that the interviewee might know enough to look things up and might be capable of selecting the right answer in the reference material/search engine results. Knowing the exact definition of ACID and nothing else means that somebody can memorize things which is useful but not useful on its own. You want people that can find a solution and have an somewhat informed opinion about it, not people who can just memorize things.

So asking about ACID is a fine thing, but expecting a text book answer is silly.

Edit: ivanhoe said it better in their post and I changed my phrasing to be less inflammatory. (My point of different hiring mind sets on different continents is not the point.)

[dkarl]

Interviews aren't even like school exams at all. School exams are designed to try to ensure that you learn a certain set of material that was covered in a class. If you missed a bunch of it, that's bad. If at the same time you did independent research in a topic that wasn't covered in the class, it's not the business of an exam to discover that.

School exams are supposed to be fair, in the sense that they only cover the topics covered in class, and only to the level of detail and difficulty covered in the class. They test for weaknesses relative to that standard. When a school exam asks a question, it's because you're supposed to know the answer.

If someone takes the school exam definition of fairness into job interviews, they are going to feel terrified and aggrieved. Interviewers talk to candidates from vastly diverse backgrounds. Other candidates didn't go to your school, maybe didn't go to school in the same country as you, maybe didn't go to college at all. There is no fair, agreed-upon set of standard knowledge. If interviewers restrict themselves to "standard" topics, they will undervalue a lot of people who have unique backgrounds and experience. Not only that, but job interviews can't just measure a candidate's weaknesses against a set standard. It isn't even really a matter of "strengths" and "weaknesses" but wanting to discover a candidate's full capabilities. You don't want to miss a candidate's depth of knowledge in an area simply because you failed to ask any harder questions that would have revealed it. When an interviewer asks a surprising question, it's often not because you're supposed to know but because you might know and they don't want to undervalue you because they didn't ask.

[throwaway9870]

My take is that too many people are telling others how to interview. It is their money, their company, their job, their life. Let them do it the way they want as long as they follow the legal requirements.

If you think you have a better way, tell us about it without passing judgement on others. Tell us why it works, how great it is, give us some qualitative and quantitative data. Most of all, enjoy your competitive advantage. But for god's sake, quit telling other people they are doing it wrong.

[Koshkin]

While I don’t disagree, the biggest problem I think is that some or even many interviewers just don’t care or not motivated enough to care whether the candidate can indeed be a great help to the company or the project and approach their interviews in a shallow and formal way.