another absolutely fucked thing about the gotcha interview is, they never stop at just one. if you somehow read the interviewer’s mind and asspull the expected (not “correct”, mind you) answer, they’ll just go “huh” and instantly pivot to a different instant-fail gotcha. the point of the gotcha interview isn’t candidate selection; the point is that the asshole interviewer has power over the candidate, and can easily use gotchas to fabricate technical-sounding reasons for rejecting suitable candidates they personally just don’t like.

shit like this is one reason our industry is full of fucking assholes; they select for their own by any practical means. it’s reminiscent of those rigged, impossible “literacy tests” they used to give voters in the south (that is, the southern US), where almost every question was a gotcha designed so that a poll worker could exclude Black voters at effectively their own discretion, complete with a bullshit paper trail in case anyone questioned the process.

(also, how many of these assholes send candidates down a rabbit hole wasting time answering questions unrelated to the position when they don’t get the gotcha right? I swear that’s happened to me more than once, and I can only imagine it’s so nobody asks why most of the interviews are so short)