Would have been a huge negative to me. I'm fine to chat with peers and discuss little riddles.

That is not what's happening when you're interviewing me for a job position. You're not my peer. We're not having fun. There's a non-subtle implication that my ability to answer the riddle will impact whether or not I get the job. I would be very annoyed if someone asked a puzzle like this too. It's not a novel puzzle. It's mostly a gotcha where intuition meets math. I could blurt out the answer. But I would instead feel it more important to slowly reason out the answer and appear to discover it on the fly. Which is pretty bullshit. And I would think you're not very smart for thinking this is worth anyone's time.

If I didn't know the puzzle and I failed to get the job I would be mad and it would stick out as something that penalized me unfairly.

In every interview I've done, lunch was explicitly bracketed by "this is a free, casual lunch that won't affect your interview at all".

And as an interviewer, I've never been asked to report on lunch chats.

> You're not my peer. We're not having fun.

Actually, most interviewers are your peers, and they typically know that you're under interview stress and are trying to help. If you can't take a break and de-stress during lunch, you're just hurting yourself.

The power dynamics at play makes someone spending time with me during an interview process where they have nothing to lose and can exert influence in the selection of me for a full time job offer decidedly _not_ my peer in that situation.

> Actually, most interviewers are your peers

Every time I interviewed someone, I ALWAYS asked myself if I would want to work with this person.

Not just, can they do the job? Not just, are they technically competent? But, is this someone I would be comfortable going to, asking for help? Are they someone I can build rapport with, brainstorm new approaches and products with? Do they pass the "have a beer together" test?

Someone who explicitly has an attitude of, "You're not my peer, we're not having fun" doesn't sound like a good collaborator. Doesn't sound like someone who can be an approachable. Doesn't seem like a good mentor to newer members of the team.

> Someone who explicitly has an attitude of, "You're not my peer, we're not having fun" doesn't sound like a good collaborator. Doesn't sound like someone who can be an approachable. Doesn't seem like a good mentor to newer members of the team.

Interviewing is a high stress situation where the person performing the interview ultimately has power. What you're discussing here is how well I can socially fit in - regardless of pressures/stress on my side of the table etc.

It's 100% performative - if I am an interviewee I'm showing you the professional version of myself which is positive attitude and politeness. I'm upholding a social contract.

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> Do they pass the "have a beer together" test?

I'm not here to have beers with you - I'm here to work. And, I think this is pervasive in regards to hiring. This can be incredibly discriminatory and I would appreciate you interview me on the value I can add with my labor vs. "can I have a beer with this guy?" That's weird to me, and as someone who interviews I work hard to not think this way... "Who I like" isn't necessarily who is going to perform in the role - I have to keep my personal preferences out of my professional decisions in my world... and I think that's fair.

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Idk - interviewing is not fun for most people. I defend op's "we're not peers, we're not having fun" perspective both as an interviewer, and interviewee. I think it's a reasonable stance to take as long as they're outwardly presenting as professional and polite as that's what actually matters... not "beers"

Neither have I, but unless I was asked to deliver my interview evaluation before the lunch, you can bet any particularly good or noticeably bad flags during lunch would go into it.

Conversely, the couple times I had those "casual" lunches as a candidate, "I'm jetlagged" was a graceful way to lie out of the question why I wasn't eating much.

If you want to destress me during lunch, don't ask me riddles which are strongly associated with interview questions

> Actually, most interviewers are your peers

Sexual innuendos from peers at the bar are one thing, sexual innuendos from interviewer are another

I feel like everyone here is missing OPs point. It seems like they had a mostly typical interview, which the candidate had probably been through a bunch of but for whatever reason wasn't to intrigued by the company. Maybe the candidate thought it was too boilerplate... I don't know. But then during lunch, when a handful of collegues are casually throwing around brain teasers, the candidate realized he would like the atmosphere. This doesn't seem too wild to me. But then again, software engineers are some of the most sensitive people I've ever worked with.

I got the point. I'm not like that person. Most aren't.

Ah I see I'm a snowflake for not liking the power imbalance and irrelevance of this sort of thing.

TBH I'd just have found it contrived and boring. I wouldn't be excited to have colleagues who couldn't just talk about normal stuff at lunch.

I think you are reading too much into the story.

One reason for the lunch is to try and relax a bit and test “cultural fit”, which is more like a blind date between two people to see if there is any spark. Ideally it is a two way conversation, where the candidate and the interviewers get to judge each other.

There is a problem where cultural fit “tests” are heavily biased against minorities - for example most any sports discussion is dominated by your social class.

Enjoying brain teasers matches a particular type of geek, and the discussion likely veered or was encouraged in that direction by the candidate. It wasn’t Machiavellian, which perhaps you are more responsive to?

If that's how you've learnt to understand empathy, then sure, I guess I must be

Maybe its role is to filter for the right mindset.

Asking puzzle questions during lunch interview is absolutely not just socialization. In fact I remember as a kid my dad explaining how lunch interviews are culture tests and how to succeed them- but it's very unpleasant for me. Best lunch "interview" I ever had was at Noname at Google some 15 years ago, it was just a relaxed conversation where we discussed the fact that Google's chefs made and served consomme.

I absolutely don't like solving puzzles with other people. On the other hand, I do enjoy writing code on my own, solving problems (not puzzles) and then sharing the results in a readable way with others.

I do like to socialize with peers, but never playing games (I prefer to play games on the computer against NPCs).

THe reason I don't like this is there are people who've asked me ludicrous puzzle questions before and they are proxies for 'people I wouldn't want to work with'.

I think there's a pretty clear difference between chatting about interesting puzzles between friends and asking annoying puzzle questions in a job interview. The power dynamic is very different, although honestly I don't often like those socially either. They can be deployed to trip other people up, make them feel small, etc. Can cause social anxiety.

As with most things, it depends a lot on the history you have with those people and the psychological safety you feel, so it depends? Definitely not with someone I just met and is interviewing me for a job.

And FWIW I also don't interview anywhere there are questions like this.

Happy to chat about puzzles when we really are peers. In an interview setting that’s not the case. For some candidates there could be a lot riding on the outcome of that interview and grading them based on puzzles that don’t really reflect day-to-day work is IMO kind of rude.

imho this is really negative. Early in my career I would have been self-browbeaten into answering such an interview question disguised as “fun” lunch conversation, but I would have hated it and thought badly of your company. Power dynamic, not subtle implications about getting the job, gaslighting, etc. all lead to a bad look.

At least normally when someone takes you out to the XYZ company “not part of the interview” lunch halfway through your eight hour interview loop and you chat small talk and background, there aren’t actual interview questions being thrown your way.

Imagine going to lunch and the interviewer striking up a conversation with “how many manholes do you suspect there are in New York.”

Well, I would have enjoyed that discussion. If the interviewer is capable of taking a break and having an engaging conversation about literally anything during an interview, that's a massive bonus in my mind. I don't need to hear about your plan to shake things up for the 10th time. If you can't see me as a person and not just a potential cog to make your department look better so that you get your bonuses, I don't want to work for you.

There's nothing clever in Googling some obscure fact just to feel intellectually superior in an interview. Red flag here too.

Didn't you have anything more interesting/relevant to talk about?

> You don't like to socialize with peers

No, I go to work for an employer and work with my peers. My peers are not my friends in most situations. Maybe for you that is the extent of your social life so you think peers have to be friends, but you mixing the two together is your work/life balance limitation being applied to those you want to hire.

Are managers that naive with regards to power imbalances with their peers/colleagues?

I have seen people with similar insensitivity fail to understand why people in their teams dont like them: "but I treat them as if we are peers!! I like playing on the 'you are doing it wrong'games"!!

> Really? You don't like to socialize with peers, with puzzles or tricky problems?

No, we like to talk about normal stuff.

Agree that the amount of entitlement in this thread is wild. People, ostensibly respected principal engineers, will turn down jobs because they are asked a puzzle question during lunch. I _hope_ we are fortunate enough for this attitude to be a possibility in the next decade.

> You don't like to socialize with peers

An interviewer is most certainly not a peer.

> with puzzles or tricky problems

Seeing a a middle school question as "tricky" it's a bit worrying.

> "You don't like to socialize with peers, with puzzles or tricky problems?"

You have to remember that, after about 2010, the software industry is mostly comprised of people who are after a paycheck and their actual interest in computers, STEM, and other nerd activates is kind of minimal. It came as a shock to me too when I realized that the old shibboleths of being a hacker had become largely absent in the software industry.

Well, if you're thinking I said what I said because I'm not a pre-2010 hacker with an interest in STEM or other nerd activities, you'd be completely wrong. I started hacking on UNIX systems in the late 1980s, got a PhD because I wanted to be a scientist, and only went to work at Google to get access to their computer farm (where I built what was the world's largest idle cycle harvesting system, for science, at the time) although the pay was quite nice!

No, I said what I said because it's hard enough to be "on" during the coding interviews and also "on" during the culture tests, to also be "interested" in your puzzle. Wrong time, wrong place, wrong signal to send. Lunch interview (and the transport to it) is about learning about other people in a fairly non-competitive way.