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Comment by kangnkodos | Hacker News Reader

Sometimes, the interviewer will purposely give you a question beyond your reach. There are a few reasons.

- To zero in on what you already know.

- To see how you react in a situation where you don't have all the information.

What is your attitude when you are in this situation? Do you shut down? Walk out? Or are you able to form open ended questions to get the missing information?

In any type of job, you're always in situations where you don't have all the answers, and need to work with others with a positive attitude. I don't know how you are going to turn this around, but maybe looking at the situation from another point of view is the first step.

Just the fact that you are asking the questions tells me there is hope.

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I ask questions beyond the job scope in interviews, but I when the applicant looks nervous, I tell them that's what I'm doing. I'm often pleasantly surprised at the answers and it's one of the more useful aspects of the interview for me.

I would much appreciate the info that that's what was happening. The context helps to calibrate correctly.

I'm sure it would make you less nervous (which is why I tell them), but would it actually help? Either the role is above your skill level, and it won't matter how you answer the questions, or it isn't and doing your best will be good enough.

Either way, there's no need to be nervous. IMO, you should focus on just answering the questions as best you can.

Helps as is in is this person looking for a specific bit of trivia that they'll write me off for not knowing or is it just an exercise to see how I reason my way through unfamiliar territory.

The fact there are so many hidden requirements you're trying to tease out is where the nervousness comes from.

One of my best interview experiences was when I was asked a few relatively simple questions, looked over a class of their code and describe what it does and some mistakes that might be in there, and went over a code sample I brought in.

Then he said, "Okay, I know you can do the job, now I'm just curious how much you really know."

And then the really hard, low level questions came out. I said I didn't know a few times, and struggled even when I sorta knew the answers, and he took it in stride and played the role of teacher and taught me a few things that I still remember today. I didn't feel pressure like I did in other interviews, despite being much harder questions than I get asked elsewhere.

If you do it that way, I'm cool with it. If you start right out the gate with the hard questions, and you make no indication that you're not expecting right answers, I have no choice but to assume I better get them right, or else (especially considering I haven't moved on to the next stage of interviews before for getting one question wrong, or saying I didn't know for one of the questions, or the HR person was looking for a particular keyword I didn't say, quite a few times).

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