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Comment by croddin | Hacker News Reader

When reading the title, I assumed this was talking about job interviews, a much different type of interview. How do these ideas apply to job interviews? Is it a good idea for an interviewer in a job interview to encourage interviewees to say I don't know, and should you be more ok with saying I don't know and then elaborating in a job interview?

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On the job interview point:

I'm always as truthful as possible in a job interview - especially technical ones. My background is not in tech, however I'm an autodidact with programming and whenever technical questions are asked that I may not know, I'll say it. And then I'll say how I think it should/would be done, or the steps I'd take to figure out the answer and solve the problem. Not sugarcoating some of my technical inability has faired me well so far. And then after I hear the question, think about the steps to do it, and/or get coached by the interviewee - I know the answer, and am ready to use it in my technical/creative arsenal. I feel like it's a win-win to not bullshit about something I don't know.

Purely anecdotal of course but I always set the scene for interviewee's that "I don't know" is a completely acceptable answer. If the question could be attempted with an educated guess then "I don't know" is perfectly fine as long as an educated guess is then attempted.

If you only get "I don't know" with no attempt at a guess or explanation for why they don't know then you may have issues.

Those are two separate questions, IMO. In the context of a job interview, however, I believe giving the interviewee permission to say "I don't know" makes the interview go better because they'll spend more time focusing on the interview and less time trying to figure out "what the interviewer wants."

I usually give a little preamble telling them to feel comfortable blurting out nonsense. I'd rather have them blurt out nonsense than sit there for 30 seconds in silence because they're afraid to say something stupid.

You can see the interviewee relax almost immediately.

My view is that if an interviewer dings me for saying "I don't know", that's a sign I wouldn't want to work there anyway.

Without encouragement, candidates answer with "I don't know" during a job interview easily stands out. If we are interviewing for a position, aren't we searching for just ONE outstanding specific individual? Should we really explicitly encourage?

A perfectly acceptable answer to me is "I don't know, but this is what I would do to find out", go on to describe what books you'd refer to, what google searches, etc.

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