经济与社会科学2018onlinelibrary.wiley.com
黑暗动机与脑筋急转弯面试题的选择性使用
Dark Motives and Elective Use of Brainteaser Interview Questions
入门 · 约 30 分钟读完前置知识：组织行为学基础、面试招聘流程常识
导读
这篇论文研究面试官为何在面试中主动选用脑筋急转弯类问题。研究发现这类问题的使用与面试官的自恋和施虐倾向等“黑暗动机”相关，即有些面试官借刁钻问题获得支配感或快感，而非为了评估候选人能力。
HN 关注点：HN 读者普遍经历过科技公司的高压面试，论文把“刁难式面试”与面试官的心理动机联系起来，引发了对面试文化及其滥用的共鸣与讨论。
HN 评论精选
这几条评论里：补充 2 亲历 2
亲历亲历者印证：刁难式面试可能源于面试官自身未自省的黑暗心理，且大厂面试神话并不成立
我在 Google 做大量面试工作（顺带一提，Google 并不使用脑筋急转弯题）。面试过程本身就很艰难，很少有人能毫发无损地走出来——我自己当年也有几场觉得“糟透了”的面试，也因状态不佳错失过明知自己够格的公司。我有个猜想：面试者会把埋藏的挫败感带进房间，借面试扮演当年羞辱过自己的那些人。那些有潜在刻薄倾向、即论文所说的“自恋与施虐”倾向、又缺乏自省的人，可能正是用这类问题让自己感觉好受些。另外，Google 这类公司“面试严苛=招到最优秀的人”的神话，在你真正日常工作中并不成立。
jfasi查看英文原文
As someone who does both a lot of interviewing (at Google) and gives a lot of advice on interviewing to people just starting out, this rhymes with my intuition about why some people get into interviews: even without the use of brainteasers (which, for the record, are not used at Google), the interview process is hard. People rarely come out of it without at least a twinge of frustration of humiliation. I'm not immune to this, I got hired at Google despite having a few interviews where I thought "God damn that was horrible," and I didn't get offers at places I know I was good enough to work at because I wasn't performing at my best for whatever reason and nuked the interviews. I have a pet theory that when people interview they bring this buried frustration into the room with them and use the interviewing process to play the part of the people they feel humiliated them. It's conceivable that people with latent meanness, or as this abstract calls it tendencies for "narcissism and sadism" who aren't aware enough of their biases to try to counteract them, will use these sorts of questions to make themselves feel better. Also, and this is probably more specific, there's a bit of a mythos around companies like Google and friends that have tough interviews and high standards: they hire the best people, they're doing the best work, they're the smartest, etc. I can tell you from experience, that mythos doesn't hold up once you're doing you day to day job. I've seen people with stunning credentials doing what most would consider exciting work become genuinely bored. Perhaps for some of them interviewing is a way of reminding themselves of how desirable and high status their workplace is, to the detriment of the poor candidate. And of course, as a disclaimer, this isn't even anecdote, these are my own personal musings on psychology. Don't confuse this with insight into the Google hiring process.
亲历亲历 Apple 面试被刻意施压，印证论文所述施虐式面试行为
我最近面试 Apple 时，一位面试官让我决定永远不去那里工作。6 小时里 8 个人轮流进来面我，多数面试官都理解白板写代码和真实写代码不同，会善意指出小错。但最后一位面试官，我在做简单除法时算错了并主动说不确定、请他指正，他却面无表情地说不会帮我。连续面试 6 小时后我脑子已经成浆糊，他明知问题出在哪却拒绝提示，只说“有问题”但不告诉我在哪。我说“抱歉花了这么久，今天实在太长了”，他回“有时候你就得当场修代码”。他显然是在测试我会不会在压力下崩溃。
8_hours_ago查看英文原文
I recently interviewed at Apple and one interviewer caused me to decide to never work there. I was put into a conference room and had 8 people over 6 hours come in and interview me one after another. Each person asked me about my background and then jumped into a whiteboard coding problem. Most of the interviewers were understanding of the fact that writing code on a whiteboard is nothing like writing code on a computer, and were helpful in pointing out simple mistakes that a compiler would have caught. While writing code for the last interviewer I had to do some simple division. I came up with the wrong answer and told the interviewer that I wasn't sure if that was correct, and to let me know if it was incorrect. He blankly stared at me and said he wouldn't help me. Usually I would be able to do the division in my head, but after 6 hours of constant interviewing my brain was starting to turn into mush. I went on and finished the solution and he said that there was an issue but wouldn't tell me where. I asked if it was an issue with the division and he said yes. He still wouldn't tell me the answer, so I floundered for a bit while trying to remember how to do long division. At one point I turned to him and said "I'm sorry this is taking me so long, it's been a very long day" and he replied "sometimes you will have to fix your code on the spot". It seemed like he was trying to see if I would crack under the pressure. Eventually I came up with the correct answer and was able to finish the problem, but it completely drained me. I decided then that I never wanted to work with that person, or with other people like them. Some jobs require performance under pressure, but programming is not one of them. The only thing that the interviewer was evaluating was my ability to do math problems in my head after being interviewed for 6 hours. Don't they have calculators at Apple? Or phones, perhaps?
补充建议：面试中保留余力读懂潜台词，比死磕谜题更重要
我曾在一家数学对冲基金面了一整天，虽不是脑筋急转弯，但是一连串扎实的数学统计题。这种日子令人兴奋（像参加奥运滑雪）但也极其耗竭，且与能否拿到 offer 只有部分相关。我的建议是：放弃最后 10% 的表现，留些余力关注情境。这些谜题只是“术前麻醉”，真正的问题在后面。你需要保留脑力去揣摩闲聊背后的真实意图、其他候选人会怎么误读潜台词、他们在避免重蹈哪些招聘失误。你可以做一只天才海豹，但会错过“你是否适合这家公司”这个更大的问题。能看到更大格局的人最终会掌管公司——别让人看出那不是你。
Syzygies查看英文原文
I interviewed a full day at a mathematical hedge fund. Not exactly brainteasers, rather a barrage of good, solid math and stats questions. Such a day is exhilarating (like skiing the Olympics) but truly exhausting, and only partially related to whether one gets an offer. My advice to anyone doing this would be to give up the last 10% of performance in order to focus some on contextual awareness. These puzzles are a form of pre-surgical anesthesia, before they ask the real questions. You need the spare cycles at the end of a long day to imagine what casual conversation might really be exploring, how other applicants might misread the subtext, what mistakes in previous hiring they're trying not to repeat. One could be a genius trained seal, by buying into the brainteaser game, and miss the broader question of how you will fit into their firm. One who sees broader contexts ends up running places; don't make it clear that's not you.
补充类比历史：刁难题目曾被用作系统性歧视的工具
这让我想起《Jewish Problems》一文，记录了莫斯科国立大学数学系入学考试中专门设计来“阻止犹太人及其他不受欢迎者及格”的题目。
spython查看英文原文
This reminds me of Jewish Problems[0], designed to "prevent Jews and other undesirables from getting a passing grade" at the entrance exams to the math department of Moscow State University. [0] https://arxiv.org/abs/1110.1556
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