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Yeah and often the interviewer won’t be prepared with a backup question so you waste time for them to find one. It sucks that it puts the interviewee in a worse position for being honest.

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A advantage to having standard interview questions. Plus the questions we ask lend themselves to extensions (also predefined) so you can still see how they reason about and solve those. And given that our interviewers are familiar with them, we can calibrate across many candidates. We also have a pool of people who maintain the standard interview questions.

Yeah I worked for a company that did all of those things as well, it didn’t change the fact that the interviewer was always less prepared with the second question, and that there’s always wasted time switching between questions. The true nightmare was when a candidate knew two questions in a row, or when they didn’t realize they knew a question until 5-10 minutes in.

In a perfect world every interviewer would calibrate for those minutes lost, but that calibration is fuzzy at best unless it’s built in to your scoring rubric.

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