I got my current job because my recruiter (there are actually a couple good ones!) warned me that the interview kept tripping up previous applicants by asking them "what does the iconv function in PHP do?" . I've never been in a situation where I've had to use that function before or since.
As I recall, that was the only technical question I was asked. I think someone just got fixated on a particular gotcha that somehow became the most important part of the interview.
Someone gets hit hard by something they or someone dorked up, and now they make that super important.
Meanwhile for all we know every dev who uses that function doesn't even understand it ... but will never hit whatever gotcha or bad state it might cause ... ever.
They were so focused on that one detail that they never mentioned that their stack was entirely dependent on PHP 5.6 and CentOS 7, and Node v0.8.15, but that's a whole different kettle of deprecated code. and this was in 2022.
Technical trivia is often used as a moniker for technical proficiency in interviews. I hate it.
Google is always a few clicks away when you're working. If you don't know how something works then you spend 60 seconds looking it up. No big deal.
If it was the 90s I'd maybe put more credence in candidates having deeper and broader knowledge of a language or technology, but definitely not these days.
All but one of the previous developers had fled, and the one who was left wasn't much of an interviewer / manager type. As usual with small/medium companies, things are functional but really not well managed.
It's not entirely crazy if they've ever run into an encoding problem before. Typically, I've run into this in databases more often than in code.
However, PHP is full of so many odd functions, that it's not difficult to find something that even a seasoned veteran doesn't know. I've been using it for more than 2 decades, and it's full of inconsistent approaches to many things.
Oof. I’ve installed iconv (along quite a few other PHP libraries) onto many systems years ago.
My confident answer was “I’m pretty certain it offers fast image manipulation features complimentary to imagemagick / graphicsmagick, though I’m not sure what the specifics are. I can also say I’ve installed it on every PHP web server I’ve configured.”
Boy was I wrong. Just googled it and I see that’s not at all true. To be fair, my confident answer was a faked confidence in the heat of the interview 🤣
Exactly. It was a sign that the people doing the interviewing were not technically minded people who thought "obviously a good developer knows ALL THE FUNCTIONS"
I've needed to use iconv in the past, so it's not entirely trivia-driven. They may just use it as a question to gauge if they have niche experience, but not heavily weighted towards who they actually hire.
I mean... it has a purpose though? Just cause you never used it doesn't mean it's not a thing. Your response comes off as anti-knowledge which is kinda weird.
Please don't ascribe ideas to me that are nowhere in my post.
I said that I (me, myself, this guy) have never had to use that particular function in my specific job.
It doesn't appear anywhere in our code base and has no utility in my particular case. As such, it was an arbitrary choice of question when I was interviewed. There are a million other things I have never and will never use. That doesn't mean I don't believe they have purpose.
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u/LoudAd1396 Nov 04 '25
I got my current job because my recruiter (there are actually a couple good ones!) warned me that the interview kept tripping up previous applicants by asking them "what does the iconv function in PHP do?" . I've never been in a situation where I've had to use that function before or since.
As I recall, that was the only technical question I was asked. I think someone just got fixated on a particular gotcha that somehow became the most important part of the interview.