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Comment by AmericanChopper | Hacker News Reader

That SME guy sounds like an asshole, but I used to have an interview technique where I’d ask increasingly specific and low level questions about the candidates area of expertise until it got to the point where I’d be pretty confident they wouldn’t know the answer off the top of their head. I wasn’t adversarial or rude about it, I just wanted to find out if they were comfortable saying “I don’t know”, because not knowing something is an everyday part of technical work, but not being comfortable saying it can be big source of issues.

The candidates who were otherwise the most competent tended to be the most comfortable with the I don’t know answer. Getting defensive about it I always considered to be a red flag.

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I've been on the other side of that table. The interviewer stated in advance that the questions would get harder until I couldn't answer anymore, and that's OK because he wanted to see where my knowledge stopped. That clarity made it much more fun than stressful. I felt alright saying "I think the answer is X, but it could possibly be Y, and here's what the different implications would be".

But for the luvagod, please state that up front. It wouldn't have been nearly so fun, or informational for the interviewer, if I'd felt like I was failing a quiz.

I like that idea, and I may need to steal it. I have this tendency of asking candidates questions, and if I feel like they’re demonstrating very strong knowledge then I may toss them a few extremely obscure questions for bonus points, but I never expect candidates to get them right.

But this up-front approach of setting expectations seems like a better way to go.

Please do. I think you'll get more signal, too. If I were worried that I've forgotten something very basic I'm expected to know, you're not going to learn much about me other than that I don't do my best work during interrogations. Tell my I'm not expected to know a thing, and then there's lots of room to talk about it, and I can show you that maybe I'm at least familiar with the ideas even if I've forgotten the particulars.

I do this, but with the goal to find a specific thing they don’t know in an area they do know. Then I want to see them work out what a reasonably possible answer would be

I'm 100% fine with that. I had one interview where we ended up talking about the best data structures for a visual editor to store text files in-memory. It wasn't related to my day job at all, but I walked away feeling like I'd learned something, and the interviewer got to watch me reason my way through unknown territory to see how I handle such things. That was fun. I have no idea if I got the "right" answer or not, but it was at least defensible, and I stumbled across some ideas that he seemed to find unexpected and interesting. I ended up getting the job.

What made it enjoyable was me knowing that I wasn't expected to know the gory details of how text editor internals work.

I always say I don’t know in interviews when I really don’t, rather than try to bluff. Some interviewers don’t like this though. As with the parent, perhaps that’s actually a good thing as you avoid having to work in a bad environment. Other times though, you may be being interviewed with a bad egg who you’ll never actually need to work with in the actual job.

I love it when interviewees say "I don't know", so long as they follow up with some sort of mental process explaining how they'd find out the answer/solution. So, "You know, I'm not exactly sure how the new payments API handles excessive requests, I've only glanced at the documentation. I can look at the docs more closely and get back to you.", or even "I don't know how the new payments API handles excessive requests, but honestly, if we've reached that point, I might wanna investigate that specific issue first, and try to figure out why we're sending so many requests." - either of those responses are great, IMHO. The response I'm NOT looking for is basically, "I don't know [shoulder shrug]."

Yeah this is basically how I see it, there’s a natural selection to it. If you practice deceit and politicking in interviews (and in the office), you’ll select yourself into, and only be able to succeed in organisations that value those things. If you practice honesty and candor in interviews, then you’ll expect the same (over time at least). In interviews I think you should just be guided by your genuine values and be yourself (well, whatever version of yourself you feel most comfortable bringing to the office every day). It probably doesn’t maximise job offer conversions, but in my experience it maximises being in working environments that I’m most likely to enjoy and fit into well.

Edit: By honesty in interviews, I mean to a point. There’s some things you absolutely should lie about in interviews (if you’re confident you can get away with it). For instance “what’s your current salary” is a great question to lie about, that they really have no business asking anyway.

Good answer format is "I don't know, but my best guess would be ..."

My first interview at a FAANG company was so awesome. The interviewer said “I’m going to keep asking you questions till you can’t answer anymore. That way I learn the limit of your knowledge. If I can’t it’s because your knowledge in that area exceeds mine.”

This framing has helped me ever since. It helped me emotionally to recognize that finding the limits of one’s knowledge is not a bad thing, it helped me get the job, it helped me interview people, it helped me hire people who knew more than me.

They don't know what the interviewer wants to hear. There are places where every admission of not knowing something is held against you.

If the employer would hold that against you, it's not a place I'd want to work. Not sure about you.

FAANGs are notoriously famous for having one bad feedback rule. That is, if even one interviewer feels you didn't answer their question they reject you.

So it looks like all the top paying places interview this way.

I guess part of what they're paying for is your tolerance of this BS then. Only you can decide if you think it's worth it.

Hard agree there. I'm quick to say "I don't know (yet)" because I don't want to waste everyone's time while I stumble through a bunch of made-up answers trying to sound smart. If I were punished for admitting I didn't know the details of something, I'd leave in a heartbeat.

I remember some experiences where an interviewer thinks they are doing a deep reach for something they think should be an "I don't know", but it happens to be something you do know. Sometimes they think you're bullshitting or arrogant for this.

Judging people and getting an accurate read on people is hard. Often people are overconfident in their ability to do it.

Remember that you are talking to humans, they are flexible. You were being adversarial. If you could explain them in advance what you were trying to "read between lines", I'm pretty sure most/all of them would have changed their answers. So what you were supposing that was unfixable/permanent, apparently is fixable within 1 minute (of explanation).

Interviewing is by no means the perfect way to assess a candidate, but ultimately that’s what the purpose is. If I just tell candidates what I want them to say upfront, then why even bother with it at all? I want to assess what qualities they have that I want/don’t want, and what qualities they don’t have, as best I can. They don’t need to be perfect. Skills can be trained, personality characteristic much less so. People are flexible enough that some of them could spend one hour flexibly pretending to be the candidate I’m looking for, but that’s not the purpose of the exercise for me.

What you should care is a behavior. You should be open about what is expected. People change behavior all the time depending on the situation/group/company/context.

People can change the behaviour for brief periods. But who they are day in day out is going to be pretty consistent. Telling people how I would want a good candidate to behave during an interview doesn’t help at all with candidate selection. An inclination towards saying things they think people want to hear is a characteristic I’d like to select out of my candidates as well, so perhaps I’ve been killing two birds with one stone here…

> People can change the behaviour for brief periods.

This is a false assumption. Especially generalizing the behavior in such an adversarial setup as a job interview to a regular day to day work/life.

> Telling people how I would want a good candidate to behave during an interview

You should tell them the rules of the game. The thing is, with interviews, there are already predefined assumptions, such as not knowing something takes a point from you, so people avoid this. In your case, you are altering these assumptions without disclosing it. So people might already had changed their behavior for the interview specifically - avoiding admitting not knowing something.

I have the same idea in interviews. they need to be able to admit when they don't know or need help depending on the level. However I thought about it and I think the continuous "why" comes off as sort of childish or low effort. I didn't want to drive off people that reasonably didn't want to work in a place with a toxic culture. My solution was to ask a question that was specific to the workplace but technical so that it would require more information to solve. I looked for answers along the lines of:

- I don't know - I don't have enough information based on the question - I would do it this way generally but this question requires employer specific information.

Not someone that just barreled forward and came up with a defacto answer as the solution. They had to give some sort of admission that they could not really solve the problem as is.

I usually had some overlapping technical expertise with the candidates I was interviewing, so my approach was to prepare a line of questions relating to some obscure or esoteric technical issue I’d dealt with in the past. Usually I’d get to an I don’t know pretty organically.

One time I had a candidate who didn’t not know about a single massively obscure thing I’d asked him. He was a DBA for a Chinese ISP that had more subscribers than we had total population in the markets we were operating in. That guy was probably the best hire I ever made. He was always in an incredibly genuine good mood, he was always happy to help everybody, and he’d help people learn how to solve problems rather than just doing the solving for them. Everybody on the team got smarter and more competent working with him, and he was so good at his job that he never even got behind on his own work due to helping other people all the time. I hope he’s still doing well now, before I left that company I managed to make sure he was being paid bucketloads of money (which wasn’t something he ever seemed to be seeking out independently, he was always just happy to come to work and do his job).

> because not knowing something is an everyday part of technical work, but not being comfortable saying it can be big source of issues.

I'm honestly never afraid to say those words, if someone doesn't want to hire me because I said it, I dodged a bullet. I'll go where the devs and leads are sensible people.

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