“Tell me about you. If your life was a book, give me the chapter titles from your birth till now.” Once you’ve gotten the overview, dive into each “chapter” and plumb the depths for their real stories. Go back to their childhood! I learn a lot about their grit and commitment to excellence from their basketball obsession or maybe their experience caring for a dying parent.
I don't think I'd be comfortable sharing this much personal information with a stranger on a job interview.
Additionally, it sounds more like a psychological evaluation, than evaluation of a person's potential at a job. I understand that maybe that's exactly the writer's intention, but I'd personally be wary of companies which ask questions like this.
There's a nauseating bias here against people who've had horrific childhoods.
"Let me tell you about the years of physical/emotional/sexual abuse I've suffered though." That's just not going to happen - and if it did happen the interviewer is probably not going to come away with "What a brave person to overcome all of that!" but "What a damaged person, I don't need them around".
Well done, you've weeded out people who've already suffered enough.
Thank you. I found the part where the author throws in "cared for a dying parent" particularly distasteful, it's like a benchmark for "palatable damage"
This interview style seems bound to create a psychologically enmeshed workplace with no healthy boundaries. Or a workplace full of people with charming, easily-shared backstories and nuclear families but no yucky problems. Would not want to work here, personally.
Any competent HR department would have a fit if they knew these kinds of questions were being asked. It's way too easy to wander into illegal discrimination when you're making hiring decisions based on people's backgrounds like this.
You'd think this was true, but I've seen some crazy shit in interviews, even at companies that were big enough and had a robust enough legal team, where you'd think they'd have their shit together.
I once interviewed at a medium sized, name brand Silicon Valley darling everyone on HN has heard of, where an interviewer outright asked me if I was married and if I had kids! Like, holy shit, just read your interview training manual! The very first sentence is probably "Do not ask any questions where the answer would even imply information about things that would get us in trouble discrimination-wise." Yet this person overtly asked! Here I was in the stairwell walking down to the second floor and she hits me up with one of the few totally forbidden questions! I thought about saying "What would HR think of that question?" but the asker was the HR manager! Totally bonkers.
The way I understand it, you can legally ask the questions, you just can't consider protected status for hiring purposes. The interview guidelines prohibit asking because "we didn't ask" is a stronger defense than "our interviewers have mental firewalls".
This case is strictly worse because the questions are explicitly being asked to evaluate eligibility for hiring.
It's still a major blunder by an HR manager but maybe there's a chance that they had already decided to hire the person but hadn't made an official offer and it was a mistimed getting-to-know-you chat? I don't know, it seems insane to even ask.
*Leans back and puts bare feet up on the table*
Are you a virgin?
https://youtu.be/fwYy8R87JMA
And now, the company is filled with those willing, or not caring about HR abuse.
An interesting strategy?
My wife was asked that question ("are you married, do you have kids?") in an interview with a tiny company 30 years ago. She attributed it to ignorance and replied "That's not a legal question to ask". The interviewer apologized profusely and he hired her. He turned out to be a really nice person who was unaware of what was out-of-bounds to ask in an interview. But that was 30 years ago, people should know better now.
this 100% - you technically can't even ask someone how they are doing on an interview as that's not job related
I could definitely see arguments for asking these sorts of questions in how they could be job related but not worth the legal risk
I haven't had (nor ever likely will) have the luxury of working somewhere where potential/smarts is too relevant past a relatively low threshold
This person came out of the Thiel Fellowship, the rules are different.
The HR people often seem to be the ones that ask the psychological questions.
Are you suggesting that this is bad? What do you hope to gain by seeking out obnoxious people with traumatic backstories and broken families with yuck problems? Misery loves company?
Why should someone’s present self be defined by things entirely out of their control (e.g. childhood trauma)? You seem to assume that “obnoxious people” and “traumatic backstories” go hand-in-hand; on the contrary, some of the most obnoxious people are those who have never faced anything in their lives other than minor and routine inconveniences. Neither person is inherently superior to the other, I’m just saying that I’d personally rather not work at a place that selects exclusively for “perfect” people along a metric unrelated to their job performance.
You were the one to make the link between "charming people", good childhoods and lack of "yucky problems". And, while I would agree that there is a strong correlation, it's true that it's not perfect.
Obviously performance is also a critical factor but your comment gave me the impression that you don't see any value (or even harm) in targeting charming people without yucky problems. They do indeed sound like "perfect" colleagues to me!
There isn’t a correlation. I am charming and would like to think generally pleasant to be around. But if you’re going to interrogate me about the entire life story of mine, you aren’t going to think that anymore.
Screening for people with life stories that you/anyone deems acceptable is extremely problematic, because realistically you will never have access to deeply personal information about 90% of your coworkers. As in, you should not be forcing Janet from accounting to disclose to you that she was abused by her stepfather, because if she is a well-adjusted adult it would have absolutely no bearing on your interactions with her at a workplace
You're one of those people who can only deal in absolutes, huh?
All else being equal, a person who enjoyed an idyllic childhood is typically going to be a more well-adjusted adult than someone who experienced the most depraved, violent, extreme child abuse imaginable.
I don't even have any interest in discussing the finer points with someone who completely denies the long-term effects of adverse childhood experiences.
You seem to be dealing in absolutes here.
We are talking about specifically work-related scenarios, that usually have pretty straightforward boundaries and surface-level interactions. "All else being equal, a person who enjoyed an idyllic childhood is typically going to be a more well-adjusted adult" - not necessarily in this specific context, people that didn't experience trauma are not immune to being awkward, immature, neurotic, anxious and various other things that makes working with them difficult.
That is not to say that people who have experienced childhood abuse can't have issues with basic human functioning. The point is, neither are necessarily are better or worse to work with just based on their trauma or lack of thereof.
It is irrelevant that people with normal childhoods are statistically more likely to be well-adjusted in most aspects of their lives, because we are only considering workplace interactions.
The author appears young. I would give them the benefit of the doubt. It has been my experience that people who have lived a fortunate, trauma free life cannot really understand the trauma experienced by others. They might appear to understand, say all the right words, and so on. Then a few days later or weeks later be confused or upset because of how you react to something. A good friend once said to me, "Wow, that is still upsetting you?" He wasn't being a jerk, he was just surprised.
If not a jerk, then grossly lacking in sensitivity, empathy and tact.
At first I agreed with you, but then I remembered: Where is our sensitivity, empathy and tact for the person who said that, who may have their own trauma and own issues?
The reality, the beauty of human relationships is that they are between people with all these issues and dimensions, all the nuance and detail that make up human beings. In the wild, there's no laboratory people - no clean, perfect specimens in simple environments.
My rule is, I don't know what someone else has been through and is going through. Never, ever judge. If absolutely necessary (e.g., I need to decide to partner with them or not), make my best guess but don't judge.
Well said. In addition to that, I think a speaker's intended meaning is also important to consider.
imo, people often take what people say literally or default to a first-instinct interpretation, rather than trying to understand what the speaker is attempting to convey. I try to interpret what people say charitably (a few of my friends think much too charitably), but I really believe that the vast majority of people seldom intent any malice in their comments.
In the example, it might have been intended in an empathetic way - "Damn, sorry, I didn't realize you were still hurting. I would have extended a shoulder to you if I realized". Or a pragmatic way - "I think the situation isn't as bad as you think, want to talk about it?" It could have been bluntly honest (personally, I typically appreciate honesty over politeness) or a totally aloof statement made on reflex. It could also just have been someone being a jerk, but I suppose the point of my rambling is that there's a myriad of ways to interpret a comment, and it's largely based on both the speaker's experiences and how they communicate.
Those are essential points. I'd just adjust the first to say, I think people tend to choose the interpretation - literal, metaphorical, reading emotions, etc etc - that suits their own emotional drive.
I find that the person I'm talking to, if I treat them as if they are a*holes, act as if that was their intent the whole time. If I treat them as if they in good faith, they act that way.
It's hard to resist the flow of conversation, to not go along with the way it's framed. I think that's why people act how you treat them; I think that's why people even confess falsely to crimes - the interrogator talks to the suspect as if they did it. Other sophsticated communicators also use that intentionally.
That may be true, but it doesn't mean that I have to submit to an interview with people like this who are lacking empathy. It also wouldn't be great if these kinds of interviews proliferate.
Empathy comes from being able to put yourself in other people's shoes. Reading fiction has been shown to increase empathy. If so then these guys need to do more reading.
Yes - I agree - intrusive interviews are a terrible idea. My comment is an observation about how some people might arrive at such ideas.
Not just trauma necessarily, but many of our defining moments include things like, leaving a religious community we grew up in, coming out as LGBTQ+, being too broke to pay bills and taking out a risky loan, experiencing racism/sexism/ageism.
Not things I'd be inclined to talk about when those things are ripe for opening myself up to discrimination.
I could only see that being relevant when there are resume gaps that may be explained by being a SAHM or caring for a dying parent.
But as it relates to actual work? No.
I was told that asking about resume gaps is a very biased question and a no-no, especially if it is a single gap, as opposed to a pattern.
Usually the answer to a single resume gap is something personal and none of my business as an interviewer, it's not my place to pry if you were raising children, caring for dying relatives or battling severe depression
That whole line of questioning is a HR nightmare and I don't think they'd get away with it in any large company. You are _not_ supposed to ask open ended questions that could reveal a candidate as a member of a protected group. They tell you that their parents kicked them out because they were gay, they don't get hired, and they file a lawsuit saying that there were forced to reveal their sexual orientation and they were discriminated against because of it.
It'd be a pretty easy win.
This scenario is unlikely to be an _easy_ win in court, but presents enough headache and just the risk of the company losing in court would most likely result in a settlement offer.
I actually took care of a relative, it wasn't the reason of the gap but it gave me some bonus points when I started my career.
Yes, I think I'd be fine weeding out people who can't read a social situation and decide to traumadump to their future coworkers.
Ok so how should someone with a traumatic childhood answer questions about their childhood?
You can change the subject or answer very surface-level and be labeled "unengaged" or "socially inept"
You can answer truthfully and be judged for traumadumping
You can make up a fake origin story that fits the interviewer's criteria and be disingenuous
I don't know about you or your story. I hope you're doing well.
I've learned that the majority of people just don't want to hear anything negative or anything that makes them feel sad. If I want to have social, casual friends, I have to wall off parts of my life story.
Thankfully, I have a couple of close friends and family who know the reality and that is enough for me.
I'm really glad I don't live in a country like this.
that's no country. you find these kind of people everywhere. my theory is that the people who don't want to hear those things have not yet dealt with their own traumas (which can take decades).
that's why i don't care about casual friends. i mean i do have some, but that's because we have some hobby that we share. the people in that group however are all replaceable.
what's not replaceable is deep friendships with people that do care and are open to listen.
Remember that we are talking about a job interview here.
Yes. Which is precisely why my childhood is irrelevant.
I agree. I misinterpreted your answer, sorry!
Like the interviewer probing private traumatic experiences in a largely one-sided interrogation?
Surely you can understand the difference between a voluntary interview and an involuntary interrogation? This is a pretty poor comparison, I think.
I agree, and personally would have no qualms about walking away from an interview I didn't like.
Would you choose to leave and walk out of an interview if you objected to something? how would you feel? Would you feel like you were walking away from an opportunity maybe? What if your situation was less than ideal?
I think you would find that many people don't feel the same independence or freedom that you and I seem to. Especially if they're not already comfortable financially.
So the interviewee is stuck between a rock and a hard place.
Between the need to have a job to survive, and the need to appease some self-important middle manager who took it upon them to perform a psych eval, with zero credentials, while controlling the future of the candidates, and their ability to put food on the table.
Kindly, make your self as visible as possible so that I know to avoid you.
Exactly. I felt intense revulsion reading GP’s comment. Collaborating in a team where there’s zero concern for people’s life circumstances is a no-go. It’s impossible to maintain work-life balance when life can’t even be acknowledged.
"“Tell me about you. If your life was a book, give me the chapter titles from your birth till now.”"
Would you consider an accurate answer to that to be a traumadump? How quickly do you think people can make up happy childhood stories when put on the spot like this?
It is a completely inappropriate question in a job interview.
Nobody is asking anyone to do that. The bias here is that a person with a traumatic past might seem uninteresting precisely because they unlikely going to share as much detail as this interviewer might want.
Ok, you seem to have read this ‘social situation’ (more like economic extortion to me) differently to everyone else here.
How would you handle this?
I didn't read this as a bias against significant prior challenges, in childhood or after. I certainly had such challenges and I've always thought most people have. Since the author's stated goal is identifying high potential, early career candidates in the absence of prior success or obvious metrics, it seems essential to look for resilience.
To me, understanding how a person has contextualized and integrated prior challenges into who they are today is a key personality trait. So much of attitude is "the stories we tell ourselves to explain what happened to us." In my case, I've always felt my childhood had "some pretty rough patches" but in total "it wasn't too terrible." Yet, the few people I've shared the details with are usually aghast at how institutionally abusive it was. I don't deny the severity of it but it's pretty revealing about my personality that I don't now feel emotionally wounded by what happened. Perhaps it was just my coping mechanism but I've always felt "that's just shit that happened to me, it doesn't define me."
I'm not marrying my company.
I want to hold it as far from my heart as corporately possible. I don't want to think about it after work, I don't want to work on it after work. I don't want it to know my secrets nor do I need to know its.
I want to be able to say peace bro and walk away whenever I want with no thought of a sad feeling. Which unfortunately does happen but it's always coworkers or cool tech.
Any company that goes out of its way to try to marry you is immediately suspect.
Just what the hell do you think emotional and physical abuse is? An overly strict parent? Perhaps you'd like to hear about what me and my siblings went through. It wasn't 'a challenge', it was a fucking deliberate attempt to destroy us as people and it succeeded. You want details? [Edit: don't ask for details]
To sort of echo and expand on what you're saying here, there's a fair argument that if you do go through capital-A abuse, and don't think it effects you, you might just have made yourself blind to the damage as a coping mechanism.
The most famous example that I can think of is Henry Kissinger, who fled Nazi Germany with his family, at age 15, to escape persecution as a Jew. He claimed, to his dying day, that he was not heavily impacted by the experience. Maybe he wasn't. But I wonder if any of the genocides laid at his feet were in part caused by his refusal to accept any impact his teenage experiences might have had on him.
Demanding that people tell an interesting/engaging story about why they have C/PTSD, just to get a job, totally tracks for the late-stage-capitalism narrative though.
I mean, sure, but for a job interview?
Even if the candidate doesn't have a horrific childhood, the question is totally inappropriate and irrelevant. Like "get up and walk out of the interview" inappropriate.
This, and the general level of mysticism throughout (really? "Spike potential" WTF), causes me to dismiss the whole article.
Shopify's made the Life Story a major part of their interview process for over a decade now, it doesn't as if they'd ever had problems attracting talent. [1] I think you might be in the minority if you feel that highlights from someone's past are irrelevant predictors in their future performance and that asking about them in an interview is inappropriate.
Personally, I'm really glad I didn't "get up and walk out of the interview" when they asked me to talk about my youth, it ended up being one of my favorite internships and helped position me towards a career in big tech :)
[1] https://www.shopify.com/partners/blog/interview-candidate
"At Shopify, all candidates begin the interview process with something called the Life Story, an interview in which the candidate sits down and discusses their work history, passions, and aspirations."
None of that sounds like the actual stories about childhood. It's totally appropriate to discuss past work experiences, aspirations and passions as a "Life Story".
Moreover the “Tell me a little about yourself” suggested interview opener is open-eded enough that the candidate can decide what they want to discuss and highlight. Majority of people do not answer that question with "my first memory was when father left when I was 3 years old..."
Oh, but you just rely on your 'intuition' when interviewing. I'm sure that'll lead to no bias.
Or weeded out honest people.
It’s literally selecting for people who can tell the best stories. Not great for any company dependent on moving fast with autonomy, with a genuine mission.
Plus “looking for grit” really means “looking for someone to work long hours (typically without good odds of realizing fair equity)”… super unethical to even attempt to be selecting for people with trauatic and toxic Pasts.
If they wanted to select candidates for learning quickly, being adaptive, whatever… just test for that.
This whole thing read like a sociopath selecting for people they can exploit.
There can also be a bias against people who haven't had horrific childhoods or particularly interesting ones, depending on the background or attitude of the interviewer.
"If he hasn't struggled, then what does he really know about anything at all?"
All in all shit question to ask. And it's pretty obvious what sort of answers people are looking for.
I've by any and all accounts had an extremely privileged, happy and stress-free childhood/life, and I'd still balk at this kind of interrogation. It's just plain inappropriate to ask something like this of anyone in a professional setting, people's life stories are simply of no relevance to the job and more importantly, nobody else's business.
Not to mention the minefield of discrimination avenues present here, conscious ones and otherwise. Hell, even a positive feel-good story about a happy life could lead to a negative reaction depending on who's hearing it, these sort of things are inherently perilous to talk about in professional settings.
I agree. This is very off putting. There should be boundaries btwn people we don’t know. I’m not going to share personal experiences for a stranger and be their little zoo monkey they want to evaluate for the circus.
This person is out of touch in such a bad way. Why would you put someone through such a cringeworthy exercise?
I didn't have a particularly horrific childhood, but every chapter title would be about social struggles, anxiety, and depression. The positive stuff was random events, and the organizing themes were negative. Isn't that true for most people?
I guess the question tests a person's ability to craft positive, attractive narratives about themselves. Maybe we're returning to a time when being outwardly happy is treated as a universal social obligation, like in the 1950s and 1960s. My parents' generation rebelled against the oppressive conformity of the post-WW2 era, and the tendency to value acceptance and emotional transparency continued through my generation (Gen X), but it could easily swing back the other way. Especially since all the stubborn problems in this country (resistance to awareness of racism, resistance to awareness of historic injustice, resistance to action on global warming, etc.) are seen as stemming from the unearned unhappiness of privileged people, I can see cheerfulness becoming obligatory, and lack of cheerfulness being openly stigmatized, instead of just passively and subconsciously discriminated against.
Edit: The rise of social media influencers as role models would obviously be a huge factor in this, and in the increasing pressure on people who struggle with something (whether it's a societal issue like racism or poverty, or a mental illness) to live up to the "positive representation" of the influencers who earn the power to define the public's expectations by presenting themselves in a charismatic, consumable way.
Yeah I was about to say this. "Tell me the story of your career" is a lot more appropriate.
You're probably still going to get a lot of irrelevant dreamy passion bullshit with that question though when in reality 95% of candidates are just looking for exchanging skills for income and you as an employer need to accept that that's how the world works.
Absolutely - anyone who focuses this much on personal life during an interview is almost assuredly clueless as to how to manage people.
My youth was by no means exceptionally traumatic, but it was no fucking fun, and cumulatively amounted in me being a “from the wrong side of the tracks” figure in software, which was eminently doable when I was getting started and is still doable, but one works awfully fucking hard for the privilege as the ambient level of bad behavior well-concealed, cronyism, insularity, and utterly obliviousness about the public’s feelings hits 88mph.
I apologize to the author in advance if this assumption is off base, but the biopic at the beginning reads like the kind of life no one from my neighborhood had.
What I will say to the author is: be a lot more careful with the power over people’s lives afforded by your current privileged status, whether you earned it or not.
Word. Mine was nightmarish (siblings didn't have it any better either). Sounds like the Disneyfication of interviewing.
It depends on the role you're hiring for. I suspect a lot of comments in this thread, echoing your sentiment, will be written from the perspective of sharp-end-of-the-stick engineers for whom the idea of working on ambiguous organizational problems is an abstract concept, far from their day to day. Not saying that's you per se, but this is HN after all. This crowd loves for things to be clear-cut, especially when they absolutely can't be.
For roles that require discontinuous improvement to company process or culture, it's necessary to get a glimpse into how someone thinks, and the elements that went into building their worldview. You need to know how they will react under pressure to an extent that I think is largely irrelevant for a lot of engineering roles.
In other words, the difference between a psychological evaluation of an individual and that individual's potential to do this sort of work becomes very muddy and indistinct. You want to have a picture of their psychology, because the problems you're hiring them for are often psychological in nature.
This is not a popular opinion among engineering types; we like things arrayed in black and white, passing tests and failing tests. But that's naive.
It's unclear to me how "non-engineering types" can make use of stories about e.g. "caring for a dying parent" in the context of a job interview. I mean, can anyone (layperson or not) actually "psychologically evaluate" someone based on anecdotes from their life?
I also worry that this stuff can be gamed. If an applicant gains an advantage by telling a story about how he "cared for his dying aunt while finishing a degree and thereby learned what's really important in life," then you're just encouraging a confessional (and potentionally dishonest) style of approaching an interview.
I have a ton of stories of a "cared for his dying aunt..." variety, 99% of the time when asked about personal stuff in the interview I am forced to lie, because otherwise the interviewer is coming out of that deeply scarred.
So my perspective is that anyone who tells you a "cared for his dying aunt..." story is full of shit and definitely is playing you.
I agree probing into the candidate's childhood is probably a bad idea as an interview topic.
However, for sake of argument, given that your story is true, shouldn't it also be evidence that those _not_ talking about "caring for dying aunt" is lying too? I mean, you told a story that didn't involve caring for a dying aunt, and that was a lie. We actually don't have evidence (either within your story, or in general I suppose?) that anyone would make up a story about a dying aunt to an interviewer...?
Yes, I have a whole palatable origin story prepared, that lines up with what people want to hear and isn't traumatizing. So it is entirely useless as a signal.
Not my fault that my life experiences aren't made for a casual conversation starter. Which is why I say this line of questioning isn't going to produce good outcomes.
And of course we don't have evidence that people make up dying aunt stories necessarily. But if anyone tells me this is the kind of experience that made them realize what's important is at the very least embellishing the truth.
When I was caring for my dying father, I learned how to function on autopilot, perpetually sleep deprived, in an emotional fog. I was also writing my master thesis and struggling to pay rent with shitty student jobs. Did it make me "realize what is truly important", hell no, but it did make me be ok with cutting corners, doing the bare minimum at work/school and striving for mediocrity because I didn't have physical or mental capacity for anything else. This isn't exactly the kind of thing employers want to hear, so I'd never bring this story up unless specifically asked. And then I'll tell you how it taught me about "what is truly important in life" which is disingenuous
If you ask for a story, and the person needs/wants the job, that story is not likely to be accurate. You get some version of "my greatest weakness is I just work too darn hard and give to the company", pitched to whatever the question actually is. Sure, some people won't, but how do you know? Proxies and stories are usually a terrible way to interview somebody.
I don't care about the details the questions are meant to generate discussions. We can have you do stupid personality quiz instead. There are no bad answers to Myers Briggs. The test is stupid but also just a jumping point to dig into someone's personality
> We can have you do stupid personality quiz instead. There are no bad answers to Myers Briggs.
Why is that the alternative? All of the above sounds awful to me. Are you looking for an employer or signing up for a cult?
They're looking for legal reasons to choose candidates they've decided beforehand.
Yeah, it's a great question to select for good bullshitters.
Doubtful indeed. They're more likely to just open themselves up to unconscious bias and prefer to hire candidates with similar backgrounds to them. 'Ohh this person started tinkering with technology in grade 8 in the basement like I did'. While passing up qualified candidates with backgrounds different than theirs.
Sometimes I think some people in business have a pathological need for things to be poorly defined. They dread a visit to the ontologist even more than they do to the orthodontist. I think some people just don't feel like things are in control unless they have a large arbitrary structure that confounds everybody else and lets them do whatever they hell they want. (Meanwhile, Steven Covey would say you should be proactive, begin with the end in mind, "Seek first to understand, then to be understood", and "Sharpen the Saw" all things that seem to make bad businesspeople melt the way the wicked witch melted when splashed by water in The Wizard of Oz)
Conversely, some in the engineering mindset have a pathological need to nail down ambiguous things to a definition because it fits their style of reasoning. Nobody thinks it's easier to work with poorly-defined things-- even with a well-defined overall goal, when the specific goals and risks in achieving it are a bit ambiguous, you're pretty likely to get it wrong if you try to stuff the problem into a neat little box, and in some cases-- e.g. teams with tight budgets-- getting it wrong is a huge problem. That sort of flexibility is what many developers lack when they get "promoted" to a managerial position because they're skilled developers rather than competent managers.
Any real revolution in living conditions (like being able to support 8 billion people on chemical fertilizers) always involved finding order in situations. Everything else is about as effective as pushing the deck chairs around on the Titanic.
Order vs disorder is a false dichotomy. The vast majority of situations fall somewhere in between "math problem with a proof" and "random assortment of unrelated events." The processes required to make progress at one end of that spectrum are different than at the other end, though most problems worth solving have components at different places on that spectrum. Engineers making micro perfection in well organized pockets is only valuable if people working in the far more ambiguous surrounding areas can apply it to the larger context.
People like thinking what they do is the most difficult and important part of any process, but most non-technical people can pretty easily look at technical work and see that they don't have the knowledge to do it-- the complexity and success/failure is very visible. Since other disciplines' obstacles and processes aren't so easily labelled and quantified, many engineers perennially fail to realize that their perceiving less difficulty and complexity in many other fields is because they lack the perception or experience to identify it.
This is a very well articulated and nuanced comment. In the most pathological engineering organizations, that lack of perception can fester into active resentment of other disciplines.
It's just that the real world is fractal. With apologies to Jonathan Swift, the exceptions have smaller exceptions that upon them prey, and they have smaller yet to bite 'em.
It's a subject (reasoning with defaults) that I've thought about a lot because it's a core part of commonsense reasoning. Back when production rules were a thing people never standardized a way of dealing w/ defaults and one of very few default-oriented programming languages is
https://ganelson.github.io/inform-website/
default-oriented programming might well resolve some of the conflicts involving object-orientation and its discontents. (e.g. defaults could be a better model for "inheritance" that works in more complex relationship graphs.)
Some people thrive by “catching fish in muddy waters”. The real motives of people very often differ from declared ones, but at a workplace it’s usually either getting promotion/pay rise or stealing from company in some way (kickbacks, bribes, benefits for their side business, etc).
Yeah, the best thing those people have going for them is that they get old and die and turn to dust so they don't have to live with the effect that they have on other people. It's one reason why the ancients invented the idea of the afterlife, to put some fear into those people.
I don’t think “oh haha aren’t engineers robotic personalities” applies here.
Fucking nobody I know gives too much of their real personality at work, let alone when interviewing.
But “haha aren’t all engineers only friends with other nerds and barely live in the real word” so what do I know?
nobody I know gives too much of their real personality at work
i don't believe that. are you claiming that they are all faking it?
i would not want to work in a place where people fake their personality just to fit in.
my experience from working on FOSS projects suggests that the stereotypical behavior we see in some engineers is in fact real. not as exaggerated as people claim, but the signs are there.
more importantly however is that among engineers i feel there is less expectation to conform to some kind of normalized behavior or personality. at best, certain aspects of someones personality don't get an opportunity to show. say for example how someone cares for their family or animals, or volunteers in non-tech areas.
an alternative interpretation of your statement would be that people do not show all of their personality at work, but only those aspects that are relevant for the work. and that is just what is needed. showing someones full personality at work is not what is expected here.
a more negative side of this is that in some places certain aspects of a personality are being actively suppressed. say, calling out problems that hurt the company, or trying to be helpful to others (and possibly hurting your own performance because of it)
It's not really faking it, but it is surface level. My coworkers don't really need to know about my childhood trauma, my struggles or my hopes and dreams.
ok, yes, putting it this way does make more sense. reality however is that at least for me, my childhood experience affects how i work. although i acknowledge that this is more about self reflection and not about actually sharing this with anyone at work. but it does deeply affect how i interact with them. for example as a team leader i can become very protective of those under me.
Completely agree, it is very important to reflect on how your experiences shaped you and become self-aware.
You may choose to share some of the deeper reasoning as to why you act one way or another, with certain people under certain circumstances. But it is a choice and not a requirement.
"I tend to be very protective of my team" should be sufficient, especially in an an interview setting
You know that statistically some number of the people you work and collaborate productively with, and get along with. They would, if given the option, never interact with you again for the rest of their lives. You know this, right?
I am a boring robot engineer because it’s easy to do. The “how was your weekend” conversations are about tech hobbies because I’m not sharing the occasions I got drunk, took mushrooms and hung out in a pool full of naked people for most of a day.
You know that statistically some number of the people you work and collaborate productively with, and get along with. They would, if given the option, never interact with you again for the rest of their lives. You know this, right?
i don't know that because i don't care. what i care about is that we can get along at work. at that point that is all that matters. chances are that the longer we work together the more we get to know each other and the more we learn to respect each other and the more likely we may enjoy interacting outside of work.
i think this goes back to the difference between europeans and americans: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39006092
well, actually it is europeans and the rest of the world, because everywhere i have been to, north america, asia and africa, people are friendlier than in europe.
but it can't possibly be true that the whole world except europe is faking being nice. it doesn't make sense. i rather think that people honestly believe that being nice is the right way how to interact with others, and that has absolutely nothing to do with being fake. it is the very thing that allows us to get along. whether i want to hang out with you after work is not a question of getting along or of our personality but one of having common interests or beliefs. and if someone doesn't want to hang out with me ever again, then it's not only because we really do not have any common interests or beliefs but also because that person is likely rather closed minded. (to be clear, not wanting to hang out is not a sign of being closed minded. they may simply have other priorities. not wanting to interact ever again for the rest of their lives however does look quite closed minded to me)
people didn't join linus torvalds to develop the kernel because of his friendly personality or richard stallman for that matter.
for sure, a friendly personality does make that easier, and a hostile one will put of some people for whom the personality does matter more, likely due to their own past experiences.
i’m weird as hell at work
i slowly show more and more of my personality
not right for everyone but i prefer being me even if it costs $$$
"But that's naive."
Or perhaps we realize that company "culture" or "fit" are often used to discriminate.
The verb "discriminate" has been (perhaps rightfully) saddled with negative connotations, but discrimination is exactly what any hiring manager is doing. You're discriminating between candidates on the basis of non-protected attributes. Obviously we don't want to discriminate on the basis of protected attributes, and it gets messy when there are areas of strong (often causal) overlap between protected classes of people and the non-protected characteristics that employers are looking for in candidates. But that doesn't obviate the need for discrimination along some axis or other. (Hard technical skills being the example that is probably most salient for the HN crowd.)
In an ideal world, anyone could do anything they wanted without impediment. But to quote Mr Lightyear, we're not on that planet. In this world, if I'm hiring you for a role where you're responsible for safeguarding the wellbeing of others (teacher, manager, doctor, whatever), then of course it's going to put downward pressure on my ability to hire you if you have a super fucked up background that makes you snap at people, attack them without provocation, jump at shadows, have traumatic flashbacks mid-sentence, whatever. I'm sorry, but that's just how it is. There are other jobs that are better suited for people in those situations.
Regarding "culture fit":
While we should try very hard to avoid promoting monocultures when hiring (for a whole lot of different reasons, particularly because diversity is crucial for organizational resilience and adaptability), the truth is that it remains a very subjective determination. It depends on your criteria for what constitutes a monoculture. You could say that we live in a monoculture with regard to our expectations for treating everyone in the workplace with a baseline amount of respect. But not everyone agrees where that baseline should be drawn. If you come into an interview and it's immediately clear to me that you're the kind of employee who's going to be disrespectful of your coworkers, and I reject your application accordingly -- well, I'm promoting a sort of company monoculture in that sense.
Then you can walk back from that into varying shades of grey regarding different individual's varying ways of signaling respect, or deemphasis of candor in certain situations, unwillingness to openly address issues, etc, and it gets very messy very quickly. Where is the line between avoiding hiring rude people and discriminating against people from backgrounds or cultures that have patterns of communication that others may perceive as rude? And so on. It requires great care.
This is the sort of ambiguity I'm talking about. To think that this ambiguity doesn't exist, or believe that we can simply wish it out of existence -- that's why I reached for the word "naive" in my original post. I think a lot of engineers are fortunate to work in positions where they don't need to wrestle with this sort of ambiguity in their day-to-day.
And yet you don't need a bunch of personal background to "see how their worldview was shaped" in order to see their worldview and value to the company. The personal questions aspect of the interview is not very valuable, leads to the possiblity of more negative biases, and potentially opens the door to lawsuits if you ask specific things.
Perhaps your view of us "naive" technical folk is itself naive.
Well, I'm an engineer myself, albeit with a lot of sidecar management experience, so I like to (perhaps naively) think that I'm somewhere in the middle of the spectrum. I believe everyone is naive in certain respects; there are so many hours in the day and no one can be an expert in everything.
But your larger point is fair: it's a very tricky and problematic area.
I do think that it can help to see how people's worldview was shaped rather than just trying to get a one-shot sense of someone's worldview based on your static impression of them at this moment in time, though.
It's analogous to asking someone to describe their prior technical work experience rather than just explaining what they know in this precise moment, and akin to someone showing their work when completing a math problem. It makes it easier to tell whether someone actually knows what they purport to know, or believes what they purport to believe, if they can show how that experience was derived.
I feel this is especially true in the case mentioned in the original article, where you as the employer are essentially taking a minor leap of faith in hiring someone. You can't rely as much on their prior work experience as a "web of trust" evidence point that they know how to conduct themselves. You need to reach for other data points.
That's not really the core issue. Those are possible things they could use to manipulate me. I won't be giving them ammo for free. I wouldn't share those things easily on a first date, why would i share them with potential employer?
Especially as a "unconventional" hire, because finding job is hard in such state, so they will have me metaphorically by the balls.
My perspective might be warped by working in post soviet country.
That probably makes perfect sense for you, and reflects most technical people's perspective, but it depends on the job.
When I've interviewed developers and other technical people when I was in that business, I wanted to gauge if they'd be pleasant to work with, and vaguely "who they are," but that's about it. In a dev interview, I'd be suspicious of someone digging into what made me tick, if for no reason other than their lacking boundaries. But even in ambiguous green field coding projects, not having the most creative dev team could maybe result in longer design times, or overly prescriptive solutions, at worst, if they're technically competent.
Edit: (That said, in one technical role I was in, a technically competent new hire (that I didn't interview) tried to bring a machete into work on their second day for reasons we never found out, despite our working in the secure block of a government building with metal detectors, man traps, etc. But I think that's probably a bit of an outlier. ;-)
However, if I was applying for a job at a creative studio doing deep creative work on amorphous topics with comparatively ambiguous definitions of success, like making a movie, designing a large brand/visual identity from the ground up, or similar, I might not even accept a job if they weren't digging into what makes everybody on that team tick. The difference between mediocrity and excellence at that stage is almost entirely based on the creative capability of the team as an entity. Someone that doesn't jibe with it will be a drag on everyone at best, or unintentionally dousing the creative flames with an unhelpful attitude and momentum-killing diversions at worst.
There's a difference into trying to understand what makes everyone tick, and going into deep personal details.
It might make sense from employer perspective, but why i should put myself at risk? It is similar to prisoners dilemma.
Design studios also tend to be a lot smaller and their reputation is more transparent than tech companies. If I was applying for a job to be a designer at IBM, I'd be more wary, but you're also much less likely to be doing the really deep-digging conceptual stuff in those roles. But when it comes to the really deep conceptual work, the chance of joining a low-productivity team or even just not jibing with them is too great. That stuff is like the equivalent of troubleshooting skills in dev. The "getting to know you" conversation would be like giving a developer some leetcode questions without actually seeing if they're good at solving problems. Like I said though, it's easier when you're talking about a business with like 15 people that you probably at least have a friend of a friend that's worked there. I guess it boils down to having the benefit of community. Also, these jobs tend not to be as sticky as dev jobs and people move between them a lot, so it's easy for you to slide on to the next place.
I also have to say that the shittiest, most toxic and manipulative job I've ever had didn't have a particularly robust hiring practice. It was my first white collar tech job so I was already used to shitty manipulative employers in lower-level support jobs and didn't catch it. They were perfectly content to figure out how to exploit people after they were hired.
"working on ambiguous organizational problems" is pretty much what I do. What's that gotta do with my childhood?
I hate personal interview questions with passion, because I had an unusual upbringing, and I don't want to make it my entire personality. So with questions that personal you are either going to be forcing me to lie (and yes, I have had to make up a version of my life story that's not traumatizing to the listener) or you are coming out of that interview with an opinion about me that has very little to do with how I operate professionally.
You can absolutely get a read on one's potential to do a job xyz without asking personal questions.
Yeah I've been interviewing and building engineering teams for teams for over 20 years at this point. Overall the article highlights a lot of valuable personality traits and signals you can pick up on. Asking about childhood is just weird though. I get that the target is low experience people, so there may not be sufficient work experience to fall back on, but at least keep achievement related (eg. tell me about something you worked on in a group lately...)
This reminds me of a blind date I went on in Korea. We somehow ended up kidding around about how some women really take astrology way too seriously only for her to demand my blood type later on in the evening.
I never knew this, turns out in Korea your blood type is very important as it determines your personality traits.
That might be true but if it’s important then it should be conducted by a trained psychologist, not some random hiring manager.
The problem is that not all pressure is considered acceptable. Others have mentioned examples of things that cause great pressure and trauma and can indicate a person is very resilient and able to recover and excel, but which would never be acceptable to bring up in an interview. While it isn't specifically the same thing as discriminating on a protected status, I see it as equally harmful form of discrimination (and a failing of law to discriminate between these groups).
This, however, seems to be a popular opinion. And one that I particularly hate.
You are abstracting the issue so far that you are misrepresenting the primary criticisms people are having. You are not a trained psychologist, and trying to get a psychological profile of someone to try to reverse engineer how good of an employee they are going to be is naive and, frankly, nauseating.
Yeah, you would have to claw this out of me with a hammer. There's absolutely no way I would be comfortable sharing that level of intimacy with a stranger.
That isnt everyone.
Some folks had a lot of adversity in their lives and are OK with talking about how they delt with it. Some people pay others to listen to this and call it therapy.
There are other ways to ask these sorts of questions: did you ever have a job that you dont want to go back to but would not give up the experience of? (Do you know how shitty a job can be, were you an amazon driver or a pickle shoveler)
When they dont have that much experience you want to know that they can be mentored.
Sure. But is "willing to talk about dealing with trauma" really a valid filter to sort potential employees by?
Ability to function during emotionally-difficult circumstances can be a job requirement. (Likely not software engineering, hence the scorn on this forum!) It's unlikely the interviewers are curious about the interviewee's story, but if a question about a traumatic experience makes someone freeze up then they may not be able to perform certain roles.
Off the top of my head, working in an emergency department of any major hospital is guaranteed to be filled with emotionally-difficult circumstances. Yet we don't ask doctors, nurses and technicians personally invasive questions to determine their ability to do their job. For someone starting a job in an emergency department, having prior personal experiences with life or death situations is a very poor indicator of ability to handle that type of pressure in professional life. So why is that relevant to office jobs?
we don't ask doctors, nurses and technicians personally invasive questions to determine their ability to do their job
because we can just ask them how they dealt with with emotionally-difficult work situations in the past.
is there any work where that is not the case?
When it's your first job in the field? We still don't use personal experiences as shitty proxy for how you're able to handle work situations
right, but for someones first job i would also not expect any experience how to handle work situations at all. regardless of how i would be able to find out it seems a bit much to ask.
that's exactly the point I am trying to make? it's ok to ask about past professional experiences, it's not ok to ask personal questions about the past.
What certain roles are needed to plunge into reliving the time they were raped or assaulted? When they were a war refugee? And while reliving being assaulted to navigate a professional space??
Off the top of my head:
- HR professionals deal with a ton of shit, including assaults.
- First responders, obviously.
- Message board moderators?
- Customer service of any kind. (The Karen memes are irritating, and really, really mean, but I swear I recognize every one those interactions from my years in those kinds of jobs.)
- I was trauma-dumped plenty of times during my teaching career, as well as been loudly - even potentially violently - blamed (by students) for all of the problems they're having in class (or maybe even life, lol).
Maintaining professional aplomb in emotionally volatile situations is a critical part of jobs which deal primarily with people, rather than things - and is more relevant to engineering sorts of roles than many engineers realize.
Look, I'm not defending those particular questions - and far less the particular people asking them. I'm offering an alternate point of view about why they're being asked. It'd be great to see posters on this forum suggest some better ways to evaluate the traits at which they're aimed.
All of those things are made far worse if you’re actively having traumatic flashbacks, and do not benefit at all from having a traumatized childhood. The actual best things for the above is appropriate training and crisis intervention strategies.
Exactly. Which is the rationale for asking about past trauma in an interview. If the interviewee locks up in a traumatic flashback then they're clearly not prepared to do the job.
Again: I'm not defending the practice. It's a really gross metric, and a really gross (in the other sense) method. I just haven't seen this thread demonstrate much understanding of what's actually going on.
You're 100% correct about crisis intervention training. I had a few sessions - of dubious worth - while I was a teacher. I worked in a group home for troubled kids for a bit, and that one included learning physical restraints - which I did end up needing. My best mentor, however, was a grizzled old waitress who took a drag on a Camel (cigarette), shrugged, and said "you just gotta let them have their say". She was a wizard at de-escalation.
therapy vs sharing my experiences are very different things. when i am willing to talk to a therapist then it is because the therapist is not allowed to share that with others.
People are ok with talking about their trauma in an interview? Next time someone asks me “name a time you faced adversity” should I bring up navigating an eating disorder in a workplace where eating is done in view of your peers and it’s socially acceptable to comment on food, socially unacceptable to refrain from a catered lunch?
Then lie and tell a good story.
Good point! Seems like the writer has accidentally optimized his interview for narcissists, psychopaths and pathological liers who excel at manipulation, instead of true high-potential young people :)
Six of one, half dozen of the other.
Sure, if what you want is a toxic team.
It's a job interview not a deposition. Isn't everybody just telling a good story to get the job?
I will say that my general opinion is that people being interviewed should be accurate with the truth but can be flexible on the facts.
All interviews except hard technical ones are optimized for liars.
And even hard technical interviews greatly fail folks who don’t do well under pressure (ie, not at all how typical software is written / projects are conducted in the real world).
So this is tuned to find the ideal corporate functionary.
They'll review your story with your references; better hope your mom has a good sense of humor...
I mean yeah that's a risk. But get it pretty close and pick the right references.
I've noticed a trend where the lower the position, the more invasive the questions become. I think it's a power dynamic - they can ask the questions because they know the applicants are more desperate.
For example, before I was an engineer, I was scraping by on odd jobs after the 2008 crash. Around that time I applied for a job at Red Robin (basically a fast food restaurant for those who don't know).
One of the questions was a huge list of various types of people - a priest, a school teacher, a police officer, etc. There were like 50 of them. I had to rank them by how "moral" I considered them to be. Aside from that, there were a bunch of other pseudo-psychological questions that tried to gauge my personality.
All for a job paying $8/hr at a fucking fast food restaurant.
I hope that stuff has stopped somewhat but it was definitely all the rage during the mid-late 2000s. I applied for Best Buy GeekSquad when I was starting my career and “failed” their stupid hour long online psych eval that was probably (or should be) illegal. Considering my intelligence and the trajectory of my career they would have been lucky to have me, but I am glad I didn’t get the job, so I would say these are red flags you don’t want to work there anyway.
I failed that as well back then! I still (mostly) remember the question that I knew was going to sink me. The scenario was that I caught a coworker stealing a pencil from the company, and the question was what I would do about it. I stubbornly chose whatever the ‘do nothing’ option was, and continued my time as a line cook for several more years. I probably dodged a bullet there.
You're correct. The pencil question is their signature gambit. When I interviewed at BB as a high schooler, I also answered this question incorrectly (but earnestly) and the hiring manager took pity on me, saying effectively "I like you, so I'll give you another chance. When the GM asks you this question you ALWAYS say 'stealing is wrong no matter what'".
You definitely dodged a bullet, btw! That job was my first lesson in corporate hell
Nope. Had to take one for BB, CVS, T-Mobile, as late as 2022.
That's kind of ignoring OP's point: people that are desperate for income will put up with abuse to get work. Of course they don't want to work there and the working conditions are often stink.
Those are definitely interview questions "sold" to companies as being able to weed out undesirables (read: find the answers to questions they cannot ask because of anti-discrimination laws).
I'd quit such an interview. Those questions are going over the boundaries of a strictly professional relationship. The thing with low-experience, high-potentials is that they may be bit more insecure than seniors and therefore might think that such questions are normal which they are not.
Exactly. You are joining a company, not a cult. Basically they are filtering for people who can speak the same jargon correctly. I have heard a lot of stories about people failing DEI questions during an interview because they didn't know the "correct" phrases to use.
Who asks DEI questions? For engineering roles? As a sometimes hiring manager myself I'm genuinely curious.
Unfortunately unsurprising. A lot of "DEI" and related topics seems to largely consist of upper-middle-class people flaunting their prestige dialect and reciting their pious knowledge of fashionable beliefs. Whether deliberate or not, it's ironically quite effective at filtering out people from less privileged backgrounds and insinuating moral inferiority in the process
It's not about being insecure, it's that they are likely to lack the experience and knowledge about if those questions are normal.
If you get those questions when you're going around on your first job interviews, and didn't get coaching on what should and shouldn't be asked/answered, you wouldn't know they were weird.
I couldn't agree more. I am not sure if there is a name for the tactic but I had two girl friends that probed like that early on in our relationships and both times it turned out to bite me during and after our relationships. It is almost a cult-like tactic to get into someone's head.
I have a large gap in my resume from a bout of depression that left me basically incapacitated for nearly 10 months.
I get asked about it all the time in interviews.
I just respond “I’m under NDA”.
I also get asked about GitHub profiles. I have a pseudonym on GitHub, and maintain a few projects. I dont divulge that information either.
“I’m under NDA” or “I only work in proprietary code with many trade secrets involved so I can’t”
I’ve probably been screened out of plenty of processes just for that, but I don’t care. I’ve been doing pretty good for myself without making my life an open book.
- "tell me about your childhood" - "I'm under NDA"
thank you for a great laugh
Hmmm, a parent can perhaps sign an NDA on behalf of their child, so could they sign an NDA with themselves?
To the lawyers!
I'll have to remember that one.
You've never had to take a psych test before an interview?
There's a difference between the results of a test and microanalysing the subject WHILE they're being tested.
Ultimately if you're talking about who you work well with, how you deal with frustration, adversity and etc, that's sorta what you're talking about.
I am not a big fan of some of the questions, but ultimately when we think of how humans work together, well or not, it's often a social thing.
None of my current co-workers, who I have now spent several years and get along perfectly well with, know about my childhood, and I will never tell them.
Agree completely. This interview approach is going to lead to terrible biases coming to the forefront that have nothing to do with job performance.
It also sounds like an HR nightmare in some states here in the US.
It's an HR nightmare in the entire country thanks to ADA. You really don't want to dig into someone's past and hit a mental health issue and then refusing to hire them because they didn't disclosure a disability to you.
+1 to the comments pointing out that these types of questions can easily veer into highly intrusive, if not overtly discriminatory, territory.
This reminds me of LinkedIn pablum more than anything else.
Yes, this is creepy and would be a red flag for me too. People gives a lot of flak to big corps behing dehumazing and such, but at least they have standard processes and this type of BS is explicitly forbidden (well, at least where I worked).
Yup. I had a rough childhood. Not something i'm exactly keen on diving into, let alone sharing.
edit: Sidenote, i take real pride in knowing the little bit i contribute to our hiring process is nothing like this. Just help me understand if you know the tech i think you'll need to know. There's no gotcha questions, no arbitrary count questions you have to answer correctly to pass, etc.
Most people I know would walk out of that trainwreck of an interview.
I was asked this question by (I believe) a very Christian burger company from Austin (Mighty Fine) at the start of my career interviewing for some sort of IT admin job with them. I think I was 22-25.
He asked "So what extra curricular hobbies did you have in high school?" And I'll never forget that it was such a weird gross question to ask someone. What are you doing, judging whether I was in wrestling or theater? Judging if I didn't do any at all because I had to work after school? Judging if I took night classes and worked during the day? Judging if I'm not at christian school after class?
Are you just being chatty and friendly? Weird question. I couldn't even remember. I DID play hockey and wrestle but I was so shocked by the question I didn't even think of those IIRC. Not sure what I said. Maybe I did say those and I'm misremembering because I'm not sure what else I would've said other than "no hobbies."
That reminds me of Shopify's "Story of your life" interview.
Tell me everything about your life, what did you like in elementary school? High school? Tell me all...
"dance monkey dance!!"
was hoping for something insightful...
we are truly in the worst timeline.
This sounds like a "Like me" bias in hiring. Your looking for someone with a similar "high potential" upbringing as what the interviewer had.
You could likely get a similar interview outcome with less interviewer bias by filtering resumes based on school/major/GPA + (alternate activity) + a battery of behavioral/tech questions. It's desirable by many employers to have a recipe to identify candidates who are less desirable on paper, but equivalent in role.
It’s heartening to read the article, pause at that section and then see this comment here.
Is some random interviewer going to be able to make deep psychological assessment of future performance based on the response? Even actual psychologists don’t do that well at predicting an individual’s future course.
Almost anyone can solve problems. You want to find someone who you actually want to work with. The days of the anti social "lone genius" are long gone.
This sort of question reminds me of the now-discredited “cultural fit” question in standard interview rounds.
In almost all situations, it meant “are you of the same socioeconomic background as the interviewer?”, so it ended up being incredibly racist and also ensured that teams had very little technical diversity.
It did optimize for fun nights out with cliques within the teams (and epic political infighting) though.
This is highly inappropriate for a job interview at least in my country. You can’t ask these type of personal questions. Who would feel comfortable sharing this with a complete stranger anyway?
Yeah fuck that. Maybe those topics can come up after we’ve been working together for a while and have built up a strong rapport and trust (not a given). This feels totally inappropriate for an interview.
It’s revealing that the author feels entitled to the interviewee just volunteering such information for the sake of a job.
I like the general idea of this article. But that question would be a huge red flag for me. That’s intrusive and I would consider such a question as offensive.
But maybe this is a cultural thing, and works differently in other cultures (didn’t check where the author is from).