It's not just clueless recruiters who ask these kinds of questions. I've had technical folks (including YC founders when I've interviewed at their companies!) ask me if I'm a rockstar developer, to rate my skills from 1-10, etc.
Other horrible interview questions:
1. Describe your strengths/weaknesses/creativity. (Dunning-Kruger pops up again. The first time this happened to me, every time I was about to mention something I was probably good at, I kept on remembering someone else who was way better, so I ended up saying "umm..." for about a whole minute. It's emphatically not false modesty, it's just that for many things, there aren't objective ways for me to know if I'm good at it. Also, if I knew what my weaknesses were, I'd try to improve them so they're no longer weaknesses! All these questions do is evaluate your ability to bullshit.)
2. Name as many data structures as you can. You have 1 minute. (This happened to me at Palantir.)
3. What does X.Y.Z. (some acronym) stand for? (Without asking me anything else about X.Y.Z.) Interviewer then proceeds to ask me 5-10 more acronyms.
4. Do you prefer working in teams, or do you prefer working by yourself? (Sounds like a false dichotomy and a stupid generalization. Sometimes, the person asking won't accept my answer when I say there are aspects of both I like.)
5. Questions where the interviewer has no idea what they're talking about. For example, when I interviewed at Google, I got asked to describe how the normal distribution converges and how I would use this to build a text classifier. (The Googler who asked me this admitted he didn't even know what a normal distribution was, the question was just something he heard somewhere, when I said I didn't understand the question.)
6. Asking me if I use Python, and when I say no, asking me to estimate the runtime of a Python program to calculate the first billion numbers in the Fibonacci sequence anyways. (Also at Google, by a different person.)
Other horrible interview questions:
1. Describe your strengths/weaknesses/creativity. (Dunning-Kruger pops up again. The first time this happened to me, every time I was about to mention something I was probably good at, I kept on remembering someone else who was way better, so I ended up saying "umm..." for about a whole minute. It's emphatically not false modesty, it's just that for many things, there aren't objective ways for me to know if I'm good at it. Also, if I knew what my weaknesses were, I'd try to improve them so they're no longer weaknesses! All these questions do is evaluate your ability to bullshit.)
2. Name as many data structures as you can. You have 1 minute. (This happened to me at Palantir.)
3. What does X.Y.Z. (some acronym) stand for? (Without asking me anything else about X.Y.Z.) Interviewer then proceeds to ask me 5-10 more acronyms.
4. Do you prefer working in teams, or do you prefer working by yourself? (Sounds like a false dichotomy and a stupid generalization. Sometimes, the person asking won't accept my answer when I say there are aspects of both I like.)
5. Questions where the interviewer has no idea what they're talking about. For example, when I interviewed at Google, I got asked to describe how the normal distribution converges and how I would use this to build a text classifier. (The Googler who asked me this admitted he didn't even know what a normal distribution was, the question was just something he heard somewhere, when I said I didn't understand the question.)
6. Asking me if I use Python, and when I say no, asking me to estimate the runtime of a Python program to calculate the first billion numbers in the Fibonacci sequence anyways. (Also at Google, by a different person.)