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Comment by rocqua | Hacker News Reader

Do you want to have that discussion with your team-lead almost fully cold, in front of his superior? Because in the article, that is the key point. The applicant was totally willing to go into a fair discussion about the pattern.

However, doing that in front of the tech-lead his boss is likely to be different from a fair discussion. Disagreement about technical architecture is fine. Doing so in front of higher management is likely a different ball game.

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Unless you absolutely need the job, I would consider this a great opportunity to figure out how his boss would react.

Getting into a lively technical discussion when you can see how well people can control their egos to find out the best course of action is very valuable. If I had a chance during an interview to find out how people behave in those circumstances I would definitely go for it. Who knows maybe the "boss" would be present in future technical discussions as well, I wouldn't want his presenc to change the discourse negatively.

And as I've personally been in positions like that (being the tech lead with the boss on the call), I'm usually thrilled to learn new information and discuss technical things, raising my opinion of the interviewee greatly.

Maybe that's because I come from a very straight forward culture where political subterfuge is frowned upon, but it wouldn't actually look very good to me if a member of my team would subtly alter a technical matter for the worse because of political pressure. Would I be able to trust that person? I would always have this doubt that they are "playing a deeper game", regardless if it was for my benefit or not.

The tech lead is not the one being interviewed here. Presumably, they are already respected in their workplace, and admitting that they learned something from the candidate's full answer should be seen as a positive by their manager. The way the candidate frames the answer is important here, so no-one seems stupid for holding a common misconception.

And if the tech lead can't admit in front of their manager to not knowing everything? That's a sign of a toxic workplace.

I'm not ashamed to admit that I have previously found myself in a situation similar to the tech lead: the interviewee gave a solution that I didn't know about - one that could be considered better - and my manager was in the room interviewing with me. I told the interviewee that this is a new direction I haven't thought about until now. It's important, otherwise we can't continue an honest discussion about the solution.

seems like having a discussion like that in front/with management would be a great way to suss out the way management will respond to future differences of opinion. A very valuable thing to know in deciding whether to accept a position

If you're already deciding you need to BS to keep the managers sweet in the interview, that seems like a pretty toxic work environment.

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