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> It's often OK to not solve the problem as long as you give an interviewer insight into how you think It's not, though. Many people have no clue how to interv

> It's often OK to not solve the problem as long as you give an interviewer insight into how you think It's not, though. Many people have no clue how to interview well, and way too many tech interviewers are obsessed with whether or not the candidate got the "right" answer. Anyone who dropped multiple mediocre solutions before a good one in an interview with me would likely get a strong hire — I love to see this kind of iterative thinking, and finding people who can role model a healthy exchange of rough-draft ideas is always a great boon for the team's psychological safety (and by extension, their creativity and productivity). But I think, industry-wide, it's not great. As a SWAG, probably ~50% of interviewers are more interested in the correctness of the answer rather than the caliber of the thought process and communication.

qumpis 3y ago
Can you elaborate on "and finding people who can role model a healthy exchange of rough-draft ideas is always a great boon for the team's psychological safety"? Would the opposite of this be flushing the idea maximally (and taking longer) before presenting it to the team?
- temporallobe 3y ago
  “psychological safety” is a newish buzz term that is basically an excuse for people who can’t handle criticism or debate, which I am seeing as increasingly common among younger devs. It is and should always be ok to freely exchange ideas without fear of being wrong, because everyone can be wrong. Even Einstein was occasionally wrong.
  - buttscicles 3y ago
    Psychological safety is what allows people to exchange ideas and be wrong without fear of it being used against them
  - wfme 3y ago
    Your comment is a good example of a lack of psychological safety - you shoot the concept down with an intellectually dishonest argument, effectively ridiculing the idea. The problem you describe is the part that is directly addressed by psychological safety. If you can provide a wrong answer and have people critique it but without ridicule, then you have a “safe” environment where people are comfortable to provide solutions without certainty on their optimality.
  - ebiester 3y ago
    It's the exact opposite. A team with strong psychological safety is exactly the type of group that knows how to present critique and debate, even between junior, senior, and management participants. The point is that participants feel safe challenging an idea.
- OmarShehata 3y ago
  Not the OP but I would say: yes exactly. A culture where you only see team members presenting ideas in their done state leads to overall worse solutions because people aren't collaborating & giving each other feedback on ideas-in-progress.
- q7xvh97o2pDhNrh 3y ago
  Yes, exactly. You want people to be able to say things like, "Hey, here's a crazy idea..." or "What if we..." without having to worry that they'll be torn apart instantly. According to Jony Ive, Steve Jobs was exceptional at nurturing this kind of creative environment. He describes it perfectly in this WSJ article [1] from a couple years ago: > As thoughts grew into ideas, however tentative, however fragile, he recognized that this was hallowed ground. He had such a deep understanding and reverence for the creative process. He understood creating should be afforded rare respect—not only when the ideas were good or the circumstances convenient. > Ideas are fragile. If they were resolved, they would not be ideas, they would be products. It takes determined effort not to be consumed by the problems of a new idea. Problems are easy to articulate and understand, and they take the oxygen. Steve focused on the actual ideas, however partial and unlikely. The other part of it is that ideas, as fragile as they are, can blossom and transform if you can get multiple people and multiple different perspectives involved in the early stages. That's why it's so powerful to have this kind of culture on a team; it lifts everyone up. The problem with polishing the idea into a final draft before sharing it is that — whether or not it's good — it's almost guaranteed to not be as good as it could have been. And, by the time the "final draft" is ready, it's too late to get involved — all the interesting rabbit holes and tangents and possibilities have already been pruned away. [1]: https://www.wsj.com/articles/jony-ive-steve-jobs-memories-10th-anniversary-11633354769 https://www.wsj.com/articles/jony-ive-steve-jobs-memories-10...
mannykannot 3y ago
It is particularly galling when the interviewer either assumes it is an easy question now that they know the answer (especially if they did not figure it out themselves), or does not understand the subtleties that a more perceptive person realizes must be dealt with before reaching a justifiable answer.
epiccoleman 3y ago
A few years back I failed an interview because I gave the impression that I didn't know much about full stack web dev. (To be entirely fair, I didn't at the time). I was a little irritated though because, though I was early in my career, I have no doubt that I'd have been a productive member of their team within a month. I had thought the interview went well - we discussed the problem they proposed in detail, we arrived at a reasonable solution by the end, I asked lots of questions and responded well when I was prompted about edge cases. I was just fuzzy on implementation details and aspects of database design that I hadn't had direct experience with. Anyway, I'm not bitter, not getting that job led to a fantastic gig that I still have today. But I did feel like they were focused on the wrong things in the interview.
- devonkim 3y ago
  I look back at myself and the kind of cringe responses (and questions!) I had earlier in my career and for the most part the interviewers were right to reject me but not necessarily on the basis of technical merit (or lack thereof). On a lot of teams being able to communicate effectively and develop a strong rapport quickly is a bigger factor for an individual's effectiveness than how much quality code and designs can be produced. Ironically, this is an even bigger requirement for smaller organizations. For example, see a pathological case a start-up of two people where they must both be _very_ good at working together or the entire company will fall apart quite quickly. Also in a lot of interviews I was unable to demonstrate that I'm competent partly because I had already burned way out from months of being on-call and losing a great deal of sleep, so I was walking into interviews at basically my worst possible performance. It took me quitting for a while, working on my own terms, and recovering slowly to be able to demonstrate what everyone saw when I was actually operating at my general level of competence in various dimensions. Additionally, got some professional help and with some clinical diagnoses under my belt with solid medications everything got substantially better after that. Going through basically an entire career with severe handicaps has made everything seem much, much easier to handle. It's ironic that the dynamics of targeting higher quality candidates are not that different from personal dating. While for larger organizations they seem to stress how much more damage a bad hire can be they have the capacity to absorb losses better than substantially smaller organizations on a purely mathematical basis. Likewise, individuals that have higher resources, emotional intelligence, capacity for grace, etc. can much better tolerate "bad" relationships yet are among the most stringent at avoiding "bad" relationships in the first place.
Frost1x 3y ago
>As a SWAG, probably ~50% of interviewers are more interested in the correctness of the answer rather than the caliber of the thought process and communication. And this is why most the interview processes as practiced today are a joke. It's far more this weird sort of cargo-cult hazing process than any actual sort of reasonable assessment. Few people give challenging problems that they expect won't get solved to step through thought processes, they have some predisposed ideal solution or perhaps probably optimal algorithmic solution on the spot. That lends itself well to a combination of assessing rote memorization and chance, I suppose.
- devonkim 3y ago
  I've said before to other technical folks that the interview process in tech is more a measure of ability to handle anxiety and stress than whether one can solve problems competently and gracefully. Granted, in my current role I make it clear to candidates that they may have to perform under pressure at 2 am when there's an outage possibly due to their code or even others' and many people are relying upon you in particular for guidance. I also make it clear that we do a LOT of things to keep such a skill from being required but no process is perfect so being able to handle such a situation without panicking is an important factor in the hiring criteria because each of those situations I can count have been very important and high impact (it's part of why they're so stressful, right?). Every other practice we have in our interview process is justified based upon historical precedent as well as a team decision for where the team wants to go next.
  - shepardrtc 3y ago
    > they may have to perform under pressure at 2 am When that happens, do you tell them they have 5 minutes and if they don't figure it out they're fired? Try that sometime and see how they perform.
  - d0mine 3y ago
    Here's a data point: anxiety from the interview (you depend on unfamiliar people judging you) is different from troubleshooting a technical incident (it is more on the exciting side).
ericmcer 3y ago
Interviewees being able to instantly produce the right answer made me think of another problem Interviewers need to account for currently: people who are biding their time until the market heats up again. There are definitely engineers hunting max salary/equity over everything and they are going to jump ship if they can get a FAANG role. Being able to spit out rote memorized leetcode and systems design questions is probably correlated with someone who wants to maximize their salary.
michaelcampbell 3y ago
> It's not, though. Many people have no clue how to interview well, and way too many tech interviewers are obsessed with whether or not the candidate got the "right" answer. On the other hand, many interviewers are just normal people who have no idea how to gauge "how the candidate thinks", but like to think they are. I saw this a lot in the heyday of Google's brainteaser type questions. (And middle managers seem to revel in it.) So the right answer is as good a proxy as they can hope for. It still sucks, but there you go.

qumpis 3y ago

Can you elaborate on "and finding people who can role model a healthy exchange of rough-draft ideas is always a great boon for the team's psychological safety"? Would the opposite of this be flushing the idea maximally (and taking longer) before presenting it to the team?

temporallobe 3y ago
“psychological safety” is a newish buzz term that is basically an excuse for people who can’t handle criticism or debate, which I am seeing as increasingly common among younger devs. It is and should always be ok to freely exchange ideas without fear of being wrong, because everyone can be wrong. Even Einstein was occasionally wrong.
- buttscicles 3y ago
  Psychological safety is what allows people to exchange ideas and be wrong without fear of it being used against them
- wfme 3y ago
  Your comment is a good example of a lack of psychological safety - you shoot the concept down with an intellectually dishonest argument, effectively ridiculing the idea. The problem you describe is the part that is directly addressed by psychological safety. If you can provide a wrong answer and have people critique it but without ridicule, then you have a “safe” environment where people are comfortable to provide solutions without certainty on their optimality.
- ebiester 3y ago
  It's the exact opposite. A team with strong psychological safety is exactly the type of group that knows how to present critique and debate, even between junior, senior, and management participants. The point is that participants feel safe challenging an idea.
OmarShehata 3y ago
Not the OP but I would say: yes exactly. A culture where you only see team members presenting ideas in their done state leads to overall worse solutions because people aren't collaborating & giving each other feedback on ideas-in-progress.
q7xvh97o2pDhNrh 3y ago
Yes, exactly. You want people to be able to say things like, "Hey, here's a crazy idea..." or "What if we..." without having to worry that they'll be torn apart instantly. According to Jony Ive, Steve Jobs was exceptional at nurturing this kind of creative environment. He describes it perfectly in this WSJ article [1] from a couple years ago: > As thoughts grew into ideas, however tentative, however fragile, he recognized that this was hallowed ground. He had such a deep understanding and reverence for the creative process. He understood creating should be afforded rare respect—not only when the ideas were good or the circumstances convenient. > Ideas are fragile. If they were resolved, they would not be ideas, they would be products. It takes determined effort not to be consumed by the problems of a new idea. Problems are easy to articulate and understand, and they take the oxygen. Steve focused on the actual ideas, however partial and unlikely. The other part of it is that ideas, as fragile as they are, can blossom and transform if you can get multiple people and multiple different perspectives involved in the early stages. That's why it's so powerful to have this kind of culture on a team; it lifts everyone up. The problem with polishing the idea into a final draft before sharing it is that — whether or not it's good — it's almost guaranteed to not be as good as it could have been. And, by the time the "final draft" is ready, it's too late to get involved — all the interesting rabbit holes and tangents and possibilities have already been pruned away. [1]: https://www.wsj.com/articles/jony-ive-steve-jobs-memories-10th-anniversary-11633354769 https://www.wsj.com/articles/jony-ive-steve-jobs-memories-10...

mannykannot 3y ago

It is particularly galling when the interviewer either assumes it is an easy question now that they know the answer (especially if they did not figure it out themselves), or does not understand the subtleties that a more perceptive person realizes must be dealt with before reaching a justifiable answer.

epiccoleman 3y ago

A few years back I failed an interview because I gave the impression that I didn't know much about full stack web dev. (To be entirely fair, I didn't at the time). I was a little irritated though because, though I was early in my career, I have no doubt that I'd have been a productive member of their team within a month. I had thought the interview went well - we discussed the problem they proposed in detail, we arrived at a reasonable solution by the end, I asked lots of questions and responded well when I was prompted about edge cases. I was just fuzzy on implementation details and aspects of database design that I hadn't had direct experience with. Anyway, I'm not bitter, not getting that job led to a fantastic gig that I still have today. But I did feel like they were focused on the wrong things in the interview.

devonkim 3y ago
I look back at myself and the kind of cringe responses (and questions!) I had earlier in my career and for the most part the interviewers were right to reject me but not necessarily on the basis of technical merit (or lack thereof). On a lot of teams being able to communicate effectively and develop a strong rapport quickly is a bigger factor for an individual's effectiveness than how much quality code and designs can be produced. Ironically, this is an even bigger requirement for smaller organizations. For example, see a pathological case a start-up of two people where they must both be _very_ good at working together or the entire company will fall apart quite quickly. Also in a lot of interviews I was unable to demonstrate that I'm competent partly because I had already burned way out from months of being on-call and losing a great deal of sleep, so I was walking into interviews at basically my worst possible performance. It took me quitting for a while, working on my own terms, and recovering slowly to be able to demonstrate what everyone saw when I was actually operating at my general level of competence in various dimensions. Additionally, got some professional help and with some clinical diagnoses under my belt with solid medications everything got substantially better after that. Going through basically an entire career with severe handicaps has made everything seem much, much easier to handle. It's ironic that the dynamics of targeting higher quality candidates are not that different from personal dating. While for larger organizations they seem to stress how much more damage a bad hire can be they have the capacity to absorb losses better than substantially smaller organizations on a purely mathematical basis. Likewise, individuals that have higher resources, emotional intelligence, capacity for grace, etc. can much better tolerate "bad" relationships yet are among the most stringent at avoiding "bad" relationships in the first place.

Frost1x 3y ago

>As a SWAG, probably ~50% of interviewers are more interested in the correctness of the answer rather than the caliber of the thought process and communication. And this is why most the interview processes as practiced today are a joke. It's far more this weird sort of cargo-cult hazing process than any actual sort of reasonable assessment. Few people give challenging problems that they expect won't get solved to step through thought processes, they have some predisposed ideal solution or perhaps probably optimal algorithmic solution on the spot. That lends itself well to a combination of assessing rote memorization and chance, I suppose.

devonkim 3y ago
I've said before to other technical folks that the interview process in tech is more a measure of ability to handle anxiety and stress than whether one can solve problems competently and gracefully. Granted, in my current role I make it clear to candidates that they may have to perform under pressure at 2 am when there's an outage possibly due to their code or even others' and many people are relying upon you in particular for guidance. I also make it clear that we do a LOT of things to keep such a skill from being required but no process is perfect so being able to handle such a situation without panicking is an important factor in the hiring criteria because each of those situations I can count have been very important and high impact (it's part of why they're so stressful, right?). Every other practice we have in our interview process is justified based upon historical precedent as well as a team decision for where the team wants to go next.
- shepardrtc 3y ago
  > they may have to perform under pressure at 2 am When that happens, do you tell them they have 5 minutes and if they don't figure it out they're fired? Try that sometime and see how they perform.
- d0mine 3y ago
  Here's a data point: anxiety from the interview (you depend on unfamiliar people judging you) is different from troubleshooting a technical incident (it is more on the exciting side).

ericmcer 3y ago

Interviewees being able to instantly produce the right answer made me think of another problem Interviewers need to account for currently: people who are biding their time until the market heats up again. There are definitely engineers hunting max salary/equity over everything and they are going to jump ship if they can get a FAANG role. Being able to spit out rote memorized leetcode and systems design questions is probably correlated with someone who wants to maximize their salary.

michaelcampbell 3y ago

> It's not, though. Many people have no clue how to interview well, and way too many tech interviewers are obsessed with whether or not the candidate got the "right" answer. On the other hand, many interviewers are just normal people who have no idea how to gauge "how the candidate thinks", but like to think they are. I saw this a lot in the heyday of Google's brainteaser type questions. (And middle managers seem to revel in it.) So the right answer is as good a proxy as they can hope for. It still sucks, but there you go.