So yeah, this type of interview exists so I highly doubt the interviewer interviewing OP was asking about work stuff...
You wouldn't answer deep personal questions from a random stranger on the street. Some questions might've been too invasive to answer were even some family and friends to ask them. Yet, it seems they felt like they should answer some interviewer they just met.
It's ultimately the responsibility of the person answering to select what and how much of themselves to share, depending on the relationship.
If the interviewer were to ask, "tell me your most embarrassing moment you had while having sex with someone", you wouldn't answer that. If they asked "tell me about the hardest day of your life" and the real, real answer was somehow that time you had that embarrassing moment while having sex with someone, you still wouldn't answer that. You would answer with what you'd be comfortable sharing with the random interviewer, if anything, else you can just decline the question.
The "embarrassing sex" is an exaggerated example. You can set your limits differently, in order to not feel
> completely emotionally drained
as the OP put it. Setting your limits such that your personal life is outside of what your comfortable sharing with the random interviewer would be appropriate.
GP comment on separating personal and work life said to imagine they tacked "... at work" at the end. You can also imagine "... that you're comfortable with sharing" as a more general rule.
In the US any employer who asks you about personal relationships during an interview is opening themselves up to an illegal discrimination lawsuit.
Asking personal questions could be seen as a way to elicit information about a protected status and thus give a rejected candidate ammunition for a claim, whether warranted or not.
It’s best to just keep questions focused on the workplace.
Even in the case of complete innocence, it often becomes a he-said-she-said situation, and the outcome boils down to which side presents the best set of “facts”.
I use quotes there because my broader experience with the court system routinely shows that it does not need be burdened by the “truth” or “facts”. That is probably because the regular cast in those venues are literally trained and practiced liars.
But if you're at a large enough company, you're absolutely getting sued for this from time to time, so you'll have the "how to not get sued" training before you're allowed to interview.
(Edit: this isn't limited to interviews. There's many, many examples of things that large companies will not touch due to legal risk, that smaller companies will... either due to lack of knowledge on the legal risk (maybe no legal department even exists yet?) or intentionally as a gamble)
It is illegal, and in my book also immoral to deny such a candidate, but the other side of the coin is there.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griggs_v._Duke_Power_Co.
[2] https://www.wsj.com/us-news/education/black-latino-teachers-...
[3] https://teachercertification.com/nystce/multi-subject-arts-a...
The specific cases you mention and the finer point is how do you demonstrate the necessity of a measure? Is high general IQ absolutely necessary for SWEs? Or is it enough to have a high logical reasoning, but don’t need spatial? Do you really need high IQ or is it enough to have a lot of practical experience with hands on skills? Do you need higher IQ to do zero to one development vs code maintenance? The devil’s always in the details with these kinds of questions, and it’s definitely not a blanket “you can’t use anything”.
It's supposed to mean "at work," but that doesn't at all mean that you can assume the interviewer is going to understand that.
Remember that interviews are 2-way. You don’t have to engage in someone’s bad faith or incompetent interviewing.
That's vastly overstepping commonly accepted boundaries. Sure, some surface level smalltalk is normal and expected: "Any hobbies? Ah, you like hiking? Nice. Where do you like to hike? Oh, I did that, too. Might I suggest hiking there and there? I bet you'd like it. Anyway, moving on!" Common ground helps conversations flow.
But an employer asking about your personal relationships? Your needs, fears, and desires outside of any technical context? (My needs, fears, and desires from compiler toolchains are totally within scope.) Your traumata? That's a level of intrusiveness crossing into "rude" territory. They have no business of asking.
"Innocuous" icebreaker questions about hobbies, the weekend, or whatever, can be surprisingly problematic.
The questions and answers often inadvertently imply things about family status, religion, physical ability/disability, socioeconomic class, age, heritage, etc. that interviews are supposed to steer clear of.
For me, this was best illustrated by one of the https://www.linkedin.com/in/lornaerickson/ funny video skits, in which the interviewer character was using "innocuous icebreaker" chat aggressively to try to extract information all over the no-no list of things you aren't supposed to ask.
(Then the skit was funny again, after the fact, when I was in an interview with some barely-out-of-school founder, who was intentionally doing one of the things from the skit...)
I had a bizarre interview (at an extremely well-known company with an eccentric, controversial founder) where the recruiter asked me directly questions that "BigTech interview training" explicitly taught me to never ask or even walk close to. I was actually shocked and stammered out an awkward "Uhh, I'm pretty sure it's fraught with risk to even ask those things" non-answer, but she seemed genuinely surprised I wouldn't go into personal family details during a professional job interview. So, it seems not everyone has gotten the memo...
Example: At the very start of the interview, candidate suddenly feels like they have to hide something about their religion, sexual orientation, or whatever, in how they answer. Or feels like their candid answer to the icebreaker was not received well.
Which is the opposite of what the interviewer intended, with an icebreaker, but their training didn't include how tricky casual icebreakers can be.
OP didn't say that, he said "hardest day of my life, my biggest life challenges" and then characterized it (his opinion) 'similar “trauma-baiting” questions'
asking a young person (I don't know that he was young, just saying) "what was the hardest day of your life" is a pretty standard question. Like on a college application, they expect you to answer it. Young people often don't have enough other experience to fall back on, and in a context in which you are expected to make yourself look good, the filter that is expected is to emphasize something that you were successful/resourceful at.
I would suggest that this is a misremembering. As someone who's hosted thousands of interviews at companies big and small, all of the questions were scoped to professional work. Why? because when you ask things like "what was the hardest day in your life" you have a non-trivial chance of getting your interviewee tell you about the time they saw someone die, cleaned up a suicide attempt, or developed a new fear. That or you see someone make something up on the spot.
Its just not a useful question. If they answer honestly, then they are going to just going to remember that sad feeling of re-living trauma. If they don't answer honestly, they are more than likely going to be pissed off at the weird prying question.
These questions are emotionally expansive, you could have been getting on really well, shared a joke, had a great conversation. All of that will be blotted out by remembered pain.
The reason why people ask "can you tell me a time you overcame a big obstacle to achieve a business outcome" is threefold:
1) can you describe a blocker with the right amount if context
2) can you talk about improving things without insulting the people blocking you
3) can you think of ways to non-destructively overcome problems
Asking about when your pet died doesn't give you useful information
Someone working for the police could say: "Yeah, my boss made me clean up a triple homicide."
Or a janitor at a fast food could say: "We found a dead addict in the toilets."
Like these are all profession related answers. Yet they are not answers you want. Stop asking dumb questions.
Is that true? Is that a cultural thing that I do not get? I am in the same boat as OP and consider these questions, if intended for no-work specific context, very inappropriate. The age is irrelevant. If you are interviewing a young applicant who is not expected to have work experience, ask them about sth in the school context instead of work context.
Young people can still have really bad experiences. Especially when you interview a big number of people, you are guaranteed to fall upon some pretty bad. It seems to me that the right expected way to answer such a question is to find some personal experience that is bad, but not _that bad_, and then try to flip it and show you persevered. It seems to me that you are selecting for people who are better in making up stories this way, than anything else, because there is very often no way to answer such a question in any truthful, factual manner.
Personally I would only give answers in a work related context, and make sure to be clear that this is the way I interpreted the question.
This is not a standard job interview question at all.
In fact if you tried asking this at any company with a legal or HR team, you'd get pulled out of interviewing people until they could train you appropriate job interview questions.
When I ask that kind of question, I'm not asking you to share about a breakup, or death of a parent, or some other non-working issue, and I would think it very inappropriate for you to do so (thus, the quick rejection email). Instead, I'm asking about how you navigated losing all your code due to a backup issue or how you dealt with a difficult client or coworker or even some problem at work that threw you for a loop for weeks. That's the subtext of these questions, as the original commentator also made quite clear.
Cubicle drama, hey?
Easy stuff. I've got a million+ SLOC behind me, no real cubicle stories worthy of note resulting, just had a few days at work clearing air strips at high altitude in Papua, had to work for a couple of weeks at gunpoint after one of our lovely clients detonated a nuclear device near enough our plane for the shock wave to affect the flight dynamics, nearly lost a whole boat to a fire under the kerosene filled float cables in the Spratly Islands region (after getting boarded constantly by various gunboats).
All good though.
The comment I was responding to was saying that the question was about your non-working life, and that it’s normal to do so.
You’re trying to argue something else. I’m only saying that interviews questions about your personal life are out of scope.
It is 100% not standard to ask questions about someone’s personal life.
The original comment says:
> Like on a college application, they expect you to answer it.
I don't know if that changes your interpretation, but if the other replies are any indication, yours is not the default.
Generally getting called in for a "founding engineer" interview is code for a company that doesn't have money for a full salary but hopes they'll find someone willing to work for some token equity grant. These jobs usually come with amateur founders who aren't good at hiring. They could have really been pushing for life experiences, thinking they were doing some breaking-the-mold interview technique.
I do agree that every candidate should know to deliver answers in the context of a work interview. Even when the interviewer starts asking personal questions, you bring it back to something related to the job every time. Everything that comes out of your mouth should have a focus of showing how you'll work well at this company because you've worked well in the past at other companies.
The interviewers may have been shocked when someone didn't know this and actually unloaded their personal life struggles without a filter. I bet every other candidate they talked to had been giving interview-appropriate answers so they didn't realize how broken their questions were.
Chalk it up to a learning experience. I am certain you didn't miss out on any great opportunity with these amateurs. You will probably never see them again. We all have embarrassing work experiences at some point, but this is a good one to learn from and then promptly try to forget.
They don’t like it when I tell them about the day I performed CPR on a guy who jumped from the roof of the office building across the street.
> What is your greatest weakness?
> I am too good at my work
What interviewers are looking for is genuine introspection of the kind a high-quality hire would be expected to have. One answer I've given before, for example, is that I instinctively focus too deeply on technical requirements; I have to regularly prompt myself to answer "why does the customer care", or I get too deep into the details and end up with solutions that fail to serve their needs. The fact that I can recognize this weakness and take action to mitigate it is a positive signal.
What interviewers are looking to avoid is terrible answers that reveal underlying flaws or show you can't introspect at all. "I don't have any weaknesses", "I have trouble dealing with dumb people who give me bad ideas", "I get frustrated when people come to me with problems but don't explain what program I should write to solve them", etc.
Lame, humble-bragging answers are not the intent of the question and will not impress the interviewer, but probably won't prevent you from being hired if the interview otherwise went great. So maybe they're useful strategically if you're worried about giving a bad answer.
It should be but nothing guarantees you from meeting an interviewer that somehow misunderstands their role and then you will be in a situation when you need to choose what to do next: try to be open or resist. Once during an interview (for a software engineer position) I was asked if I had a family and when I replied that I didn't, I was asked why. You might be able to cut it down in an appropriate way but in a situation of stress (which a job interview represents of course) you might not.
In Blighty, that would surely have garnered a response along the lines of 'they were all lost in an industrial accident involving a steamroller and a packet of Lurpak'.
you are stating your opinion as fact, and I don't think there is a basis beyond your opinion, you simply don't know.
I agree with you the interviewee could have handled the questions better to not be so revealing about himself, setting boundaries the interviewer was crossing, but it might have been precisely the intent of the mental health company interviewer to elicit responses like that to stay away from emotionally wounded people.
I think that "generally..." is a little harsh.
The person might just not have worked in a stereotypical corporate drone environment before.
Or they might normally have been able to handle the corporate drone interview theatre, but are overextended by the context (e.g., laid off in this job market, which can easily be more stressful and existential than most actual work situations), and a bad interview hazing just yanks on that.
There's going to be more and more overstressed people showing up to tech job interviews, and people on the other side of the table will need empathy and understanding, if they're going to make good assessments despite the context.
But it was also part of the worst interview I have ever had and these misguided 5 minutes for a weird intro were on the low end of the wtf scale.
"... at work" expectation in an interview advertised as non-technical can be ableist screening anyways. Gonna poke that elephant since you're drapping it.
If they have to pick up their kids in the afternoon, then it's probably better that they work closer with the other parents than of they're late risers who prefer coming to the office at 10
Maybe the above is an European thing.
I don't even remember (been a while since I did lots of interviews) if you're allowed or not allowed to ask any of the aforementioned things but I can tell you from experience that about half the candidates would mention their partner and/or kids anyway, because it just is usually not a problem. But it's not such standard fare that someone not mentioning would raise a flag either. I guess most of us just don't think about it.
Also, tech is a bit different and I am not that old - but in Germany you could see a ton of personal details absolutely no one is interested in on CVs, but it's getting better. (What your parents do for work, if you are married, what name you had before marrying, if you have a driver's license for a desk job, what primary school you went to, etc.pp)
It's totally something you can bring up later, when already hired, if the job description made clear that it gives you flexible working hours.
That said, I have been asked if I had kids, in an interview. Later in my career, when I was trained to perform interviews, I was explicitly told to NEEEEEVER ask that. And if the candidate volunteers it, to basically pretend you didn't hear it.
If the interviewer did in fact share their personal trauma story as the author says then it would seem to indicate that was what they were asking for.
I know of places where that kind of sharing was the norm.
"I fail to recall the exact wording of the discussion topics, but they were, in fact, non-technical"
"This person gave the impression that it was a safe space to share"
I mean yes, the correct way would have been to politely decline to answer - but it very much reads as the intention of the interviewer was to get into all the personal stuff, to better evaluate - and sueing them possibly the right move.
.... why can we never find hires?
I think people (especially HR) need to realize we all pretend to be mentally sounds. These issues make us human, and if you are trying to filter by this, you'll end up with maskers as colleagues.
I think the mental health startup part and the wide scope of the questions (hardest day in life, not hardest day in career) made it clear that this meant what it said.