Recently I went to a product manager interview.
They asked a few questions, for which I gave the answers. But eventually one interviewer asked extremely trivial questions i.e. first year of graduation questions—How does the wifi router work? How does DNS work? How does internet work? These questions are so generic, trivial and basic but at the same time, nobody can remember everything. These questions do not require you to use your logic either. It is a simple memory based question. But since I wrote the answers to these questions over 10 years ago, it is impossible for me to remember them. I understood the bias at play here, but I could not give a name to it. There might be multiple fallacies or biases at play here. Can you please help me pin point them?
It seems to me that your reasoning here mixes egocentric thinking, black-and-white thinking along with mind-reading.
Egocentric/Black-and-white: When interviewing people, the interviewer usually doesn’t care about individual performance but about how different interviewees compare with each other. If something is a question that’s hard for everybody to answer,
Mind-reading: It’s possible that the interviewer didn’t cared at all about your memory but cared about your ability to give decent answers when you don’t know the technical details of what you are asked about. That seems to be a skill that matters to a product manager.
Thank you for the answer Christian—The objective isn’t really to check if the interviewer is fair or unfair. Whether he is committing a logical fallacy with his knowledge or without his knowledge is out of the question. He might not be doing this deliberately. He might genuinely assume that all interviewees for the role must be aware of the generic stuff. We are not trying to understand the interviewers mind, but a simple error in asking generic questions for a specialized role. In fact, it is one of my friends who went for the interview, let me quote the exact thing—My first round of APM interviews for a giant internet / tech corporation in Israel, was going great.
These questions are very trivial, anybody with a CS degree, must have written them down in multiple credits, but expecting general knowledge in a specialized interview is a fallacy or a bias. I just want to find the right name for this bias. I am not the first person, to face this kind of situation. Henry Ford Faced a similar situation—http://www.successlearned.com/napoleon-hill-think-grow-rich/files/basic-html/page64.html—I just need to know about the name of the exact bias, these people have become victims to or fallen prey to!
You can’t decide whether or not someone made a reasoning error by engaging in an action without understanding the goals that the person has for engaging in that action. The goals are part of his mind and the fallacy in which you engage by assuming you know the goals is mind reading.
You seem to treat the situation like you are the first person whom the interviewer asked those questions. In most cases that’s not true and the fact that your friend faced the same questions is evidence for it not being true. You should expect that the interviewer knows the kind of answers the average interviewee gives to the question.
The situation isn’t similar at all. In the case of Henry Ford the question is whether there’s coherent concept of ignorance under which Ford as a single individual can shown to be ignorant. It’s also not a situation where people get ranked against each other based on their ability to deal with the same questions.
That said, the case of Henry Ford was a win for everybody involved. Ford got publicity, the newspapers had a good story to sell and had a judgement of 6 cents against them and didn’t have to pay Ford the 1 million in libel that Ford was asking for.
Hi ChristianKL, I dug deeper and did some more research and found a few biases or fallacies, that cause this Henry Ford situation - (1) Appeal to Tradition—i.e. asking the same questions, because they were asked by everybody since ages -
(2) The Illusory Correlation—Finding a relation between two unrelated variables in this case—candidates who can’t answer these specific questions in this specific form aren’t eligible for the role
(3) Appeal to Elitism or Snobbish version of Argumentum Ad Populum
All the elites use Ritz, so if you are an elite you must also be at the Ritz! All the elite intellectual knows the answers to these questions and if you don’t know that answers to these questions, may be you are not elite!
I have written an article about the same, please let me know if these fallacies/biases can directly or indirectly cause the Henry Ford Interview Situation! Also let me know if you can add to the list.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/henry-ford-fallacy-general-knowledge-interview-questions-boni-aditya