4 ms·
Did the interviewer caution about the candidate's direction because they cared about the candidate and wanted to help, or because the solution was unique, unfam
by skeeter2020 2y ago
Did the interviewer caution about the candidate's direction because they cared about the candidate and wanted to help, or because the solution was unique, unfamiliar and made them feel uncomfortable?
If you tightly script your interview, but then present it as open-ended and flexible: that's on you.
My take if I was interviewing (and forced to use this approach): appreciate what a interesting interview this was, explicitly tell them "wow! that'd didn't go as we planned, but interesting approach!", maybe steer conversation to the pros/cons of unique/efficient solutions vs. less terse / bog-standard approaches, have some prepared code to debug and refactor (instead of expecting the candidate to produce it).
I do a lot of interviews and most of them are so boring and forgettable. The best ones are unique and the candidates shows passion about <anything> in any demonstrable way.
- whstl 2y agoYeah, I'm pretty sure the typescript solution was way beyond the skill level of the interviewer. Which is fine. But what's unacceptable is that a lot of people in our industry are not mature enough to admit when they don't know something, and instead just chalk it off as "unreadable" or some other adjective.
- doctorpangloss 2y agoEvery candidate who has ever shown me an interesting solution to a purposefully open ended programming question wildly exceeded expectations.
- lowbloodsugar 2y agoI was once interviewed by someone who is quite famous in the industry, even then, and he looked at my program for his test and said “This can’t possibly work.” And then later I got the job offer because he’d figured it out and it totally worked.