I think that's kind of the point. Dan Luu can change his priorities to do a performative display of what interviewers expect and then Dan Luu can pass a job interview. In which case you are not hiring Dan Luu, but a different guy who has most likely internalised a different world-view and set of values. Even if you assume he can compartmentalize his interview performance skills, he will have at least devoted time to that, instead of to something "more useful".
I don't think Dan Luu is struggling for work.
So the question is do you want to hire someone like Dan Luu or not? If the answer is yes, then you might want to consider how your interview process might interact with such a person. If you are thinking from the perspective of someone doing the hiring (as those articles seem to be), it is nonsensical to simply respond by saying "well, the candidates just need to be more submissive and compliant to whatever our process is."
Perhaps Dan Luu is a unique snowflake and/or nobody needs to hire someone like that. Or it could be that there are quite a large number of developers with attitudes and experience that lead to similarly unproductive or inefficient interactions with tech interview processes because those processes may be fixating on having the candidate do a specific performance rather than trying to understand what individuals can offer and whether that would be useful when added to the existing team. It could be that such developers would be as good or better fit, in a lot of cases, than people who can do oscar-winning interview performances.
> I think that's kind of the point. Dan Luu can change his priorities to do a performative display of what interviewers expect and then Dan Luu can pass a job interview.
This is the problematic logic I was trying to highlight: It's written as though he's infallible. He knows the correct answers to the interview questions, but he also deduces what his interviewers are thinking and why they're wrong.
The other possibility is that maybe the interviewers know what they're doing when they decline him, even when he answers the questions correctly. Interviews are about more than just reciting the correct answers to the questions, but he only discusses them as a sort of pass/fail quiz where the candidate is supposed to guess what the interviewer wants to hear.
My perspective is likely quite different as a hiring manager. The part where he talks about Palantir walking him out the door despite correctly answering the questions as fast as they can deliver is the kind of thing that happens when the interviewers agree that someone is smart, but isn't a good fit for the team. If you do enough interviews, you eventually come across people far more brilliant and successful than yourself whom you would nevertheless not really see fitting into your company's work culture. Someone who openly boasts about dodging interview questions and debating interviewers because they think they can read the interviewer's mind (and they are wrong) fits this description. You know they'll do fantastic things somewhere, but they're not the kind of person you're looking for to fill the open position on your team.
> I don't think Dan Luu is struggling for work.
Neither do I! I never meant to imply as much. Dan posted the long Twitter thread over a period of several weeks, so it appeared in my timeline frequently. I only brought it up as an example of his writing style, not his career.
I've not gotten the job offer from some interviews in which I aced the tech but in which I did not 'fit' (how do I know, well recruiters and people from company told me but also I knew, I often either breeze through interviews or I fail miserably and these I breezed)
In one interview where I would have gotten it but didn't the reason was basically I wasn't submissive, the tech lead was in my opinion rude and so when he made some technical mistakes I pointed them out. Why did I do that? Because I did not need the job. If I had needed the job I would have been submissive.
Perhaps a lot of interviews fail to hire Dan because the interview process is geared towards hiring someone who needs the job. Why is this? No idea, especially as lots of interviews take place with someone who already has a job and the new place wants to attract. But for some reason companies want to attract flies with vinegar and not honey, contra the old adage.
on edit: regarding on why I did that, well I also did it because the lead was rude. Otherwise I wouldn't have pointed out when they were wrong.
When I started at a company, I listened to stand-ups of 'yeah 4 weeks' and whined I could do it -today-. And I could. I was a rockstar, everyone else was an old lump.
FF to today and I realize how much I didn't know. Mostly business relations, relations with product, proper testing and pipeline integration, and honestly...just thinking. I used to be prolific and just write and write. Today I think way more than I write, and accomplish more.
This would be more meaningful if we knew what you think makes a rockstar engineer.
Some people value extreme speed.
Others are impressed by somebody who will dive down a rabbit hole and follow however deep it leads, discovering the linker bug or kernel driver interaction that causes a failure, and patching it.
Or maybe you are impressed that they go away for a month, talking to nobody, and come back with a complete system all ready to ship.
Or they write libraries that everybody uses because they are so exactly what people need.
Or they are always available to explain things to junior people and get them going in the right direction.
Each of those would be unusually valuable, at some places, and would have trouble getting any recognition, at others.
I don't think Dan Luu is struggling for work.
So the question is do you want to hire someone like Dan Luu or not? If the answer is yes, then you might want to consider how your interview process might interact with such a person. If you are thinking from the perspective of someone doing the hiring (as those articles seem to be), it is nonsensical to simply respond by saying "well, the candidates just need to be more submissive and compliant to whatever our process is."
Perhaps Dan Luu is a unique snowflake and/or nobody needs to hire someone like that. Or it could be that there are quite a large number of developers with attitudes and experience that lead to similarly unproductive or inefficient interactions with tech interview processes because those processes may be fixating on having the candidate do a specific performance rather than trying to understand what individuals can offer and whether that would be useful when added to the existing team. It could be that such developers would be as good or better fit, in a lot of cases, than people who can do oscar-winning interview performances.