I think that answers your question.

Look, you're asking someone to walk into an interview, with people they do not know, and lay out a portion of their personal life for examination, without any idea of how that information may be used against them. That's pretty unfairly tilted in favor of the company.

I, for one, do not discuss my private life in depth in interviews - it's not the company's or the interviewers business to know that, beyond certain legal issues.

I may choose to discuss at some point in the future when I better know the person to whom I speak, but until then, it's strictly a professional relationship.

You seem to be assuming that the company's goal is to find a reason to reject someone. That's not correct.

If anything, it's tilted in favor of candidates that have the same hobbies as interviewers.

Look, I know it sounds confrontational, and I don't go into interviews expecting a hostile environment. But I also don't go into interviews expecting to speak of anything other than things directly related to the business.

I would be very uncomfortable if asked to speak about anything not directly related to the business or business environment there.

(After all, I think that leaving work at 6:30PM to go to a Haskell Users' Meetup at 7:00PM where you will drink sugary, caffeinated soda and/or beer, eat bad pizza from a corporate chain, and watch an hour-and-a-half presentation on a programming and theorem-proving suite that is perpetually unready for use on machines with less than 8GB of RAM is downright insanely messianic language fanboyism. That doesn't mean I didn't go right along and watch the presentation to be sociable about it and to give everyone their time to make their case. Hell, it doesn't mean I didn't have a good time, even if I left after my coworker's presentation because I didn't want to stay until 10:00PM to watch a theorem-proving presentation I couldn't understand.)

It is illegal for a company to not hire on undue reasons such as race, religion, political affiliations, etc., but you are entering into an employment relationship, and it is not unfair to understand more about the person you are paying to work with.

Presumably because you want the job. You wouldn't want to talk about them for the same reasons you wouldn't bring up religion or politics or any other hotly contested subject.

I like Anime, I watch My Little Pony, but I wouldn't bring either up in an interview. Why? Because I know what most of the rest of the world thinks of me with just those two statements. I have MLP shirts, my wife knows people that said 'If I saw a grown man walking around with one of them on I would take my children somewhere away from that pedophile.' That is basically verbatim, with no exaggeration. I am not ashamed of my interests, but I am not mentioning them in an interview.

Of course, I'm also not looking for a job to stand in for a social club either. The only 'fit' I am interested in is can I do the job and are my co-workers not idiots.

Really? I dunno--I always saw employment as more of a business transaction, and I don't give a damn about the personal lives of those I do business with.

Well, that depends. 40 hours a week out of 168 is less than 1/4, but it's certainly true that you spend at least half of your weekday, waking life at work. But more pertinently, it should be time that's set aside for work. I don't know why what we do outside of work should even be a factor, or why I should have to share the cultural values of my coworkers. It comes dangerously close to discrimination.

Well, I think communication is affected by personality "type". So people more "similar" communicate more effectively. If someone is not comfortable talking about anything except work, that says a lot about that person. If what it says is good or bad is another question, but to me it sounds like a boring human being ;)

- I wrote a scraper for MyAnimeList.net to an sqlite3 db in order to build a mobile website.

- I wrote a shell script that i keep a copy of in each folder for each anime series i watch. When the script runs, it parses its own name as a number and adds one, so that i can easily keep track of what episode i'm up to.

I'm sure there are ways to turn almost any controversial hobby into something technical and demonstrable. Even if it's not something that you've built directly - Do you use the MAL Updater? Have you tried out Vocaloid? Using a really interesting playback method (hi10p, lavf, madvr, ...)? You could explain how they work.

My other favourite example in the same vein is Avery Lee of Virtualdub fame (with EA, last i heard?). He maintains some fantastic software and an enthralling blog, and it all comes back to Sailor Moon.

One of them is a research project, so I can always talk about that at the risk of coming across as single-minded.

The other is a bit of software I'd like to turn into an on-the-side lifestyle business.

Point is, yes, outside the US, and to a lesser extent the rest of the Anglosphere, approximately half the world has some kind of left-wing views. Probably as many people have a hobby someone might embarrass them about. It's just not very common in polite company, in most cultures (where I live now it's downright common), to bring up this kind of out-of-work stuff as part of a job interview.

As to the anime, I once mentioned in a daily SCRUM meeting that I wanted to get done a meeting with my team leader before 5:30 because I wanted to get to an anime club at 6PM. A senior colleague, who I really do like and admire most of the time, said that Rule 1 of Anime Club is never to talk about Anime Club. This man was a professional software engineer, working in a software company, who had himself sold bootlegged imported anime back in the '90s as a side gig, and here he was engaging in geek-shaming.

That was one of the many things which made me feel deeply, deeply uncomfortable in that workplace, the other one being the fact that many people there openly and enthusiastically brought up their right-wing libertarian views (without my prompting, this was between other person 1 and other person 2) during work hours.

Overall, the various little details I hadn't detected at the interview eventually added up to a gestalt feeling that the place had the company culture of a particularly right-wing frat-house. I didn't last long there before leaving... on good terms with everyone, but feeling uncomfortable and ashamed nonetheless of leaving a job too early-in.

Hmm.... which means that for small companies like that one, you've actually got a very good point. If I bring up something controversial or unusual and the interviewer can't accept that I have views and hobbies outside work which he/she deliberately asked to hear about (provided I don't go into some boring technical lecture on an obscure topic in Computer Science I like or a physics discovery I don't actually understand nearly as well as I think I do), then it's almost definitely not a good match of a place to work for me. The model just breaks down when we're talking about large companies, or places that have a lot of good going for them outside their company culture.

No, he was making a joke about Fight Club. But if you are determined to feel persecuted, I'm sure you can find a way. The anime club at my workplace meets weekly in a conference room to use one of our projectors. Several coworkers have figurines or wallscrolls in their offices. And yes, this is in America.

Further instances included people, starting with the same man, explicitly stating that they preferred the X-Box 360 to the Nintendo Wii because the Wii is childish. This was around the time "Elder Scrolls: Skyrim" came out, so there was a bit of a buzz about the new game release. I had mentioned being excited for the new "Legend of Zelda" game, which was contemporaneous.

I wasn't "determined to feel persecuted". Remember, if I had felt persecuted when interviewing, I would never have taken the job. I had really been excited for that job, actually.

I had never expected my coworkers to share my out-of-work hobbies, but I had expected that if the topic came up in casual conversation, I wouldn't be labeled childish or immature for what I like doing outside of work (particularly since I was, at that time, the youngest person in the office... but still old enough to be a college graduate who can legally drink working a salaried job and living independently).

A poster further down has mentioned "My Little Pony" (which, thank God, I didn't even know about back when I worked at this office). It's another fairly good example. If you ever reveal to most people that you enjoy that show, they will say to your face that you're some kind of manchild JD Salinger character, or someone with severe gender identity issues.

Which brings us right back to the issue that you should not be talking about this stuff in a job interview unless the interviewer has actually established that they are a good-natured and tolerant person who cares more about how you answer than what you answer. And I would hold that the same standard should apply to being a far-right Tea Party member, or having a cockfighting hobby.

That sounds reasonable. But I wonder if it's always true that you can't label anyone? What if someone mentioned that they spent all weekend doing a <super childish activity> :) Would you not label them as childish? (I'm not saying anime is childish)

More to the point, I think it's fine to express disinterest or even dislike other peoples hobbies etc, as long as it's done in a non-hurtful way. I don't think that's labeling people. It's just finding common ground. It's a way to stop people from going on about things you know you have zero interest in hearing about.

Although I think it would be a great near miss to find out I was going to suffer religious/political persecution before accepting a job.