"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.