[epiccoleman]

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.

[caskstrength]

> 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 have no doubt that I'd have been a productive member of their team within a month.

Did you consider that they might have skipped you not because you were "fuzzy on implementation details" but because you projected that vibe "I don't know much about what you do but I bet I can be ask good as you at it in a month"?

[epiccoleman]

I don't think I projected that vibe. I knew ahead of time that the architecture interview was going to be the hardest part for me, and made an effort to show that while I had gaps in my knowledge, I wasn't going to be afraid to ask questions and have discussions to make it possible to get work done. I have a bit of an aversion to unearned overconfidence so I like to think that I did not project that in the interview, but obviously I can't experience myself from the interviewers perspective.

When I interview junior candidates, attitude, interest, and capacity for learning are more important to me than specific knowledge.

Anyway though, it was their choice, and I clearly didn't demonstrate what they wanted to see. Not getting that job left me in the right place at the right time for a job that I really love, so... ¯ \ _ ( ツ ) _ / ¯

[devonkim]

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.

[jddj]

Capacity for grace is such an interesting framing. Is it commonly used in the sort of fields which measure people on those characteristics?

I put it into DDG but didn't find much.

[devonkim]

I came up with the term myself which is why you can't find it but I also half expected someone to have named it as well. Because "manners" or "nice" is a mostly culturally-loaded or very subjective term I wanted to say "be considerate to others above how even one would want to be treated." And it's a word not used daily except among the religious in the West, and that works well for those groups because "act how you would in church / template / mosque / synagogue" as a reminder of what civility can look like. Granted, some churches in the US are truly frightening to me and maybe I should refrain from calling on such emotions.

[nvarsj]

One of my more embarrassing interviews was early in my career, after I'd be developing HFT trading systems. I'd never worked on a web app in my life, and was asked the difference between 4xx and 5xx codes. I had no idea. Something I could have googled in about 10 seconds was the pass/fail criteria for an interview.