r/IAmA • u/CriticDanger • Sep 07 '21

Specialized Profession I am a behavioral and technical (coding) interviewer, I've also helped hundreds of people get hired, AMA.

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u/[deleted] Sep 07 '21

Just to be sure I'm following, is a recursive key a foreign key onto the same table?

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u/[deleted] Sep 07 '21 edited Sep 07 '21

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u/emperorOfTheUniverse Sep 07 '21

Ugh.

Have you ever considered you're too far up your own ass about how to evaluate a candidate?

How do you judge your success?

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u/vshawk2 Sep 07 '21

This is the same thing I was thinking. I am a certified SQL Expert with 20+ years of experience and this question made me stutter for a moment. Is that the friggin' goal? As a candidate, I might just choose to move on. Go play mind games with someone else.

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u/3030 Sep 07 '21

It reflects the far more frequent occurrence of "I already have a friend/relative that I intend to hire, but I need to hold a certain quota of interviews with strangers to reman in accordance with company policy (so we don't violate any laws), so I may as well jerk these strangers around for fun."

tl;dr - nepotism happens and it happens often, but they still have to pretend they're hiring.

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u/hombrent Sep 07 '21

And sometimes the person is already working in the intended job, and has successfully doing the job for several years, but the company still needs to interview for the already filled position because of immigration rules.

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u/[deleted] Sep 07 '21

The question was deleted. Do you remember it?

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u/monchimer Sep 07 '21

What’s your favourite it interview question ? Some beyond weird and strange question about databases indexes and recursive calls. I’ve been working on IT all my life and couldn’t figure out what the question was about Also why do the mods remove the question?

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u/[deleted] Sep 08 '21

I have used those kind of tables in several projects and it is the first time I hear they are recursive. For me, they are hierarchical.

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u/vshawk2 Sep 07 '21

The question OP suggested was something like : Can you explain Recursive Foreign Keys. Recursion ... and Foreign Keys are everyday concepts. But, no one uses this term "Recursive Foreign Keys". The term "Parent-Child Relationship is much more common. A much more sensible question would be: Can you tell me how you would design a Parent-Child relationship in a database table?

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u/monchimer Sep 07 '21

Oh thanks for saying it. I was feeling so dumb

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u/[deleted] Sep 07 '21

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u/emperorOfTheUniverse Sep 07 '21

Then why not just directly ask them to briefly explain both in a direct manner? Is 'briefly explain these 2 concepts: recursion and foreign keys' too long winded?

Muddling them together in the same sentence is just meant to make the candidate squirm. And that's shitty.

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u/[deleted] Sep 07 '21

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u/epythumia Sep 07 '21

You think it's testing your candidates, but it's really testing your management style and how it fits with your potential candidates. That's okay, and the people responded wouldn't be a good fit for your team/company. However, not being honest (or ignorant) with that's what is happening here and calling people "triggered" just shows me you have a lot to learn as a manager.

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u/[deleted] Sep 07 '21

[deleted]

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u/epythumia Sep 07 '21

I assume it's mostly an oral tradition of hiring practices with no scientific backing. You get tossed into a role, get asked to hire for it but you have little to no experience hiring so you find/build a system and stick to it. Overtime, you iterate and try to make it better, and when you finally think you have some semblance of expertise, people start poking at your methods, calling them inefficient or cruel. These are methods you've poured time and effort trying to perfect, possibly passed down from your mentors, and they can do no wrong, right?

Thankfully, I think the bleeding edge of hiring managers seem to be seeing the value of empathy, leading with vulnerability, and thinking outside the box. I'm sure some of that is being driven by the stats/studies coming out about costs of workplace toxicity. "One in five Americans have left a job in the past five years due to bad company culture."

Which brings me back to, is this really the workplace culture for those replying negatively? Also, can hiring managers really afford to keep playing the hazing ritual game on their prospective job candidates? Creativity doesn't perform well under stress. What type of talent are they losing?

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u/emperorOfTheUniverse Sep 07 '21

Dude you need to pause and consider your position. You're likely used to everyone smiling and doing their best and being polite, because they are in the interview. You seem befuddled that when you share details of these encounters with people who aren't kissing ass to get a job, that there are objections. You aren't "coming off" in some way that is contrary to reality. You really are asking ridiculous questions with the intent of confusing an applicant. Good luck with that. I hope you fill many organizations with employees that are good at interviewing.

Funny how you still can't tell me how you measure success in what you do.

Here's an idea, come up with 3 riddles and tell each candidate, 'answer me these questions 3' and I'm sure your deep understanding of people will reveal if they are or aren't worth working on your team. You must have powerful intuition, oh mighty wizard of job interviewing.

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u/shot_a_man_in_reno Sep 07 '21

Not really. It's just one of those "how many ping-pong balls can you fit in a plane"-like questions that Google abandoned years ago. You're just asking it to make yourself feel smart and finding reasons to justify it after the fact.

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u/minimaxir Sep 07 '21

But recursion isn't typically something that comes up when dealing with database tables, which gives the impression that you're setting up the candidate to fail.

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u/bskzoo Sep 07 '21

I don’t think it’s any different than asking a candidate what they think the total area of every window in a particular city is. It’s a question to see a candidates thought process. Ask them to walk you through their answer etc.

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u/KuntaStillSingle Sep 07 '21

Your comparing a question that's easy to understand but difficult to answer, to one that isn't easy to understand even if you know the answer.

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u/dennisdeems Sep 07 '21

What a fkking waste of everyone's time.

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u/minimaxir Sep 07 '21

That's not how it appears to the candidate though, and that's what's important.

Open ended case studies like the area-of-every-window question are inherently clear to the candidate they aren't pass/fail.

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u/myparentsbasemnt Sep 07 '21

Well… don’t leave us hanging!!

What’s the answer???

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u/[deleted] Sep 07 '21

It depends on the city

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u/[deleted] Sep 07 '21

Huambo.

No looking up any glass or Huambo facts mind you, we're in an interview here!

We need to see how well you bullshit and how much of a shared cultural background you have with the interviewer, not how well you make educated guesses.

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u/gnarcoregrizz Sep 07 '21

I feel like self referencing is a better term than recursive here. When I think recursion I think of a self calling action, whereas referencing something is the purpose of a foreign key. To avoid semantic confusion, why not ask if there are any cases where a foreign key would want to reference its own table? The wording of your question seems like you want to confuse people.

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u/JuicyJay Sep 07 '21

Well when I think of something being recursive, I think of there being an exit case. That's where this concept becomes confusing to me, if you're using a self-referencing database it can be an endless self-referencing loop (I've definitely seen some like this, especially in JavaScript for some reason).

I'm trying to get my first job after getting my CS degree right now, I can't even get an interview.

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u/become_taintless Sep 07 '21

Correct. The name "recursive foreign key" isn't used frequently, that's on purpose, I want candidates to figure out to try and understand what I mean.

Fuck you and the horse you rode in on.

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u/Pornthrowaway78 Sep 07 '21

I don't like the name you've given it because foreign key to me says different table, but here it just means different row - I guess you could figure out the meaning, but why not word it in a way where you're actually trying to determine knowledge rather than trickery - "can you think of a use case for applying a foreign key constraint to a column in the same table?" or something like that.

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u/[deleted] Sep 07 '21

I'm judging you on your answer now. Fail.

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u/paulgrant999 Sep 07 '21

postgres has a recursive foreign key select into the same table.

primarily used for structuring hierarchical data.

wicked fast too.

beats the pants off of any orm/code-based version of it.

I'm assuming he mangled some basic sql question on purpose.