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by rubberband
1255 days ago
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I try to be different when asking my share of questions in interviews... My favorite to ask is: "Tell me about a time you really screwed something up." This can be a design decision, or may accidentally running "drop table users"... This is an open ended question. The more experienced interviewees will pivot to how they learned something from it or whatever. I'm just looking for general humility tbh. If they're nervous or confused, I'll share a few of my stories, like the time I really did drop that users table, or tripped over a power chord in a data center when disaster recovery testing was being done. |
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Warning signals in responses could be someone claiming they've never failed at anything, or trying to push all the blame onto former colleagues without owning any part of it, or when asked what they'd do differently in a similar situation in future, saying that they'd do exactly the same thing.
All that said, I'm not sure this kind of question adds that much value to an interview pipeline. Many candidates early in their career may not yet have war stories of how they broke production, or may have poor interview technique and not really know how to handle this well. Arguably asking this question is putting someone under pressure in the stressful context of an interview, to see how they respond. People who are already terrified by the interview process may not respond very well at all -- but how relevant is this to the role you're hiring for?
This question might give you a strong red flag to reject a candidate < 5% of the time, but it doesn't give you a reason to accept them. They still have to do well on the other parts of the hiring process that assess technical skills & problem solving.