If an interviewer, who has the power to deny you a job unless your answers are satisfactory to them, is unprofessional enough to abuse that by pressing you for inappropriate personal details during the interview, then there actually is no correct answer.
You can't assume that person is going to act in good faith about anything else in that situation, so even refusing to take the bait is still ultimately a roulette wheel that can just as easily be labeled as "difficult" or "combative."
If it would be unprofessional to bring those things up freely, then it's actually more unprofessional to coerce people about them as a screening criteria -- whether that's coercing them into putting on a show of dancing around the issues, or coercing them into giving you honest answers.
A candidate can be aware that these kinds of questions are supposed to have boundaries, but that's different from whether an interviewer understands or respects that. And if they don't, those people are also in a decision-making capacity that doesn't often empower you to just say "no."
Even when those things are scoped to "...at work," there are still answers that happen at work that are equally inappropriate to go digging for. "Tell me about a time you experienced adversity," for instance, could turn up health or family details that people might have juggled with their jobs -- things that you aren't actually supposed be considering as a factor in these decisions.
I also don't know, when someone is spending 90min screening you for "culture fit," that you can assume they're asking you for things that are strictly related to the job. They should be, but that's different from whether that's always a realistic presumption you can make.
I've had some rather interesting interviews myself, with several of my most ridiculous stories ironically being from here.
One guy -- the reason I started building a tracking tool, after I noticed that his email was autofilling when I went to send him a message -- ghosted me after I wasn't available the first day and time he suggested. Which was also a holiday.
Another place, a stealth startup, was a panel interview with their three founders -- two tech leads and the CEO. The tech leads actually had really interesting discourse, and I wish I could remember the name of the guy who told me that "testing means never having to use my brain for the same thing twice." It actually never occurred to me before that an interview could provide you with useful knowledge, let alone that an interviewer could make a point of imparting those things on purpose. However, their CEO asked me to commit 5 years of my life up while also refusing to tell me anything at all about what the company did.
Within the past year I also encountered one that expressly asked me for things I didn't like about a previous employer; badgered me when I didn't want to elaborate about a specific, traumatizing, walking HR complaint of a man; and then -- after I described vaguely how organizations and their leadership change over time -- explicitly asked me to rate that individual on a scale.
(The other two were a while ago, and Idk that they still exist, but the last company was SerpAPI, who advertises here fairly regularly.)
Personally, I'm not sure from my own dives into it that I'd still insist on bare CSS in a professional codebase any more than I'd insist on plain DOM manipulation. And I do at least see Tailwind classes as being a little less of a DSL than other, similar tools. But while I'm not going to be a purist about it at a workplace, I both agree with you and have noticed a layer even beyond your point: that overreliance on these things leads to not learning HTML beyond a junior level.
It gets really easy to lean on class-based CSS and use a `<div>` for everything instead of ever learning what a semantic element is.
And that contributes to other bad habits, like writing a bunch of JavaScript to define behavior that could just be natively handled by your browser.
A weird personal irony is that because no employer has ever asked me to directly write CSS, what's actually made me better at CSS is JavaScript -- namely that my understanding of selector logic has improved a lot after picking up Web scraping.
I should probably note a detail I left out here: I myself care a lot about standards, and simply am stating that I wouldn't push teams around me to suddenly drop Tailwind even if I personally would rather not have to rely on things like it everywhere. Less that my opinion goes away and more that I don't presume it's the only valid option at scale.
But in my personal projects, I myself have just stopped using libraries entirely for styling.
I saw a LinkedIn thread just the other day that called it the "suicide prevention industrial complex," and that phrase will stick in my head like "orphan crushing machine" or "leopards eating faces"
What on earth is the "industrial complex" part about this? Outside of pharma pushing pills I'm not sure what other profit-seeking, recursive elements exist in the "suicide prevention industry".
Legitimately curious about this - not sure how these words would apply.
Not entirely sure what the GP meant either, but maybe it's like sports betting? Where some companies are heavily advertising and trying to get people to become "responsible gamblers" (addicted), meanwhile, some of those same companies are investing in mental health treatment facilities on the side. Thus, those gambling companies can make money off gambling addicts and when gambling addicts try to quit. As the saying goes, the house always wins.
Um. I don't have the link directly in front of me, but the tl;dr of the OP's point (that I was referencing/quoting in the above comment) was that, in the US, our efforts around suicide prevention are last resort options, that we offer instead of actually fixing any of the things that make people here suicidal. We gut mental health resources, and fuck people over in pretty much every other critical, material way -- healthcare and otherwise... But meanwhile we make a big deal about how we have a hotline, and how the number is even easy to remember now.
It's sort of like how we give enormous amounts of money to cops (institutionally), instead of funding the safety nets that actually reduce crime. Actually (edit), those analogies are kind of related, because the same safety nets are important for driving down both of these things. Yk, because people are more stable in other ways when they aren't in desperation all the time.
You might say it's the difference between emergency services and emergency prevention.
I mean, I'd argue it's worse. Cigarettes don't run your communication networks, and aren't a functional necessity for businesses to advertise their services.
On that note, not that I think regulation is the entire solution in the first place (see ATProto for an example of something independent of government that gives me hope for the Internet), but I feel that where a lot of the "protect kids" Internet bills fail is that many of them treat that as a separate, special concern in a lot of areas where they could cover it anyway by just trying harder to protect users.
In the US, where I'm writing this, it's sort of like how our age discrimination laws are written just to protect elders, but didn't do anything to protect them from the lower floor that came from letting businesses keep spreading stereotypes about who the minimum wage is for or otherwise pushing hustle culture onto 20somethings.
The use of the Internet to astroturf political discourse is an example of this -- you can't fully protect kids from school shootings with an Internet safety bill if you're not also going after bot farms that exist to benefit the "thoughts and prayers" crowd. But you're also never going to see that in an Internet safety bill for kids, because that (and for that matter a lot of our discourse about addictive mechanics in general) explicitly leaves out voters.
(clarifying edit: I'm not saying there aren't valid concerns around this topic. I am saying that when we say things like "experimenting on users' mental health without their knowledge is bad," the baseline should be that you don't have to add anything to the sentence for it to be taken seriously.)
FYI, this place says they value transparency but have an explicit policy against providing feedback after interviews. (They did take my documentation PR after the fact.)
Attempting to network with people here led them to promise me at least a response (since these roles were still open, and have been), but they ghosted me then -- only to blindside me about it over a year later, when interviewing me for a different role.
And while they're not the only place ever to grill me about a bad experience at a prior employer, they are the only place ever to explicitly ask me to tell them something I didn't like about one. Or to rate a previous boss (horrible or otherwise) on a scale of 1 to 10.
This, by the way, was all while I accommodated an overseas recruiter by taking an interview at 7pm on a Sunday.
I don't at all feel like I encountered the same level of respect, and while I was genuinely interested in their stated values (including but not limited to their value proposition) and their subject matter, based on my actual interactions with them I really can't recommend applying here.
You can't assume that person is going to act in good faith about anything else in that situation, so even refusing to take the bait is still ultimately a roulette wheel that can just as easily be labeled as "difficult" or "combative."
If it would be unprofessional to bring those things up freely, then it's actually more unprofessional to coerce people about them as a screening criteria -- whether that's coercing them into putting on a show of dancing around the issues, or coercing them into giving you honest answers.
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