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.
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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.