I agree with you. Unfortunately, this is a trait common among all of Joel's rants; his "articles" are--at most--twenty percent useful or truly insightful information, while the rest is just--for lack of a better (or wrose) word--totally crap.

The other unfortunate thing is that a lot of people give too mich weight to his opinion. As you have illustrated, this could come at the cost of dimissing a good candidate simply because he doesn't know how to design a house using the Joel's architectural principle of uncertainty.

Well stated--as the candidate, would you really want to work with a team where certain crucial information (the customer today is a family of giraffes!) was routinely left out? A candidate would have every right to walk out of such an interview without a backward glance.

I know I wouldn't want that kind of person as my boss ... where I could never rely on the information they gave me because they would leave something out intentionally, either to see if I was "doing my job" or to create a scapegoat if something went wrong.

Those sorts of questions say more about the interviewer than the interviewee.

I am a little touchy on this particular issue because a friend of mine recently interviewed at Microsoft for a pretty high level position. The hiring manager (last interview of the day) said that everyone had said "hire"...then proceeded to act so obnoxious in the interview that my friend decided not to bother pursuing the job.

- adam

Mind games, puzzle tricks, gotcha impromptu zingers, irrelevant “IQ tests”, “moving Mount Fuji’isms and Chris Sells’isms”, sneaky hidden trapdoors of the Spolsky sort and all the usual Microsoft shenanigans are a wash. Smacks me more of Geeky Eliteisms, people cut off from the real world. Past history, past accomplishments are very relevant, and if any question into someone’s prior background or knowledge, someone hasn’t done their homework. You only bring people in that already have “the right stuff”, the rest is just to see how they will fit into the unique culture and what type of personality factors are at play and even that is all very subjective, depedent upon the 3 people chosen to vent you up. Not a science, I guess I’d just feel out the passion, you can sort of tell someone who is really into it, or just faking it to “get a job”. The best hires are ones that are interviewing YOU.

I would sort of agree with your views, but here is the mentality one would probably be looking at:
An example would be some companies which pick up projects outsourced to them. Many a time each product comes with a list of specifications (say from Company A) given out to Company B. Lets say one of the spec. says: Spec1.0: Ask user for filename/file path and process it to do yadayadayada.
Here is the issue. Company A forgot to mention what to do if the file was not available. Should you say "File not found" or should you look for a likely match and print out "You said file John.jpg, did you mean Jon.jpg?" and if user says yes, process that file.
Catching such issues at Spec Review stage helf cutting down costs by an astronomical amount and this is what one wants to see when asked "Design a House".
Unfortunately, "Design a House" would be a bad example to ask. You are here for a software dev. position. Maybe something like "A part of the product spec. I am looking into right now says XYZ. How would you approach its design?" Keep the spec ambigious and see if the interviewee actually jumps straight into design or looks for ambiguity, gets them cleared up and then designs. My suggestion would be present him a real software world example which tests his approach rather than "Design a House".

As a candidate answering these questions, the "more information" is a stage of your answer. If you put 20% of your time upfront into this information gathering, you will do fine. You can then work on your design. As long as you have incorporated minimum 2 research items into your answer, you can also use common sense design and experience to put the product together. The "more information" is not an endless loop to a successful answer...