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.
Rocking the product, design, analytical & leadership questions.
Than iv’e got those 3 technical questions from hell, that made me crush & burn.
How an internet browser works?
Tell me how a wifi router works?
Explain how DNS works?
Summarizing the 20 minutes that came after those seemingly simple questions—catastrophic disaster.
Now here is the thing...
Day after failing the interview, i could sing you the answers to those questions backwards while asleep.
Do you think it makes me ready to apply for similar APM program?
Or should this experience indicate a bigger gap in my technical knowledge, required as a PM?
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!
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