[tstrimple]

The best interviewer I've had when applying to a company made it very conversational. It wasn't "solve this problem on a white board". It was how would you go about designing an application like Twitter that had to serve XXX millions of requests per day. I was just coming out of the (small) startup world and hadn't had to explicitly design for this sort of scale yet. But as I started talking about it, he asked questions which exposed some of the issues in my initial approach so I pivoted and addressed them. He wasn't looking for a fully formed solution directly out of my head, but was trying to figure out how I thought about and approached problems. The way he went about it was also very low pressure and felt like something you might be spitballing with a coworker over drinks. I try my best to emulate him when I'm in a hiring position.

[dontlaugh]

That’s roughly how I’ve been doing it. The problems presented are always the same and there’s a set of clarifying questions written down for various options the candidate might offer. Only enough structure to keep it somewhat consistent.