[EGG_CREAM]

That’s pretty dumb. I want to work with people who say “I don’t know.”

Edit: to clarify, your advice is good, what you said isn’t dumb. That criteria is dumb, in my opinion. I don’t want my colleagues to spend a bunch of my time guessing on an answer I could easily lookup or find on a calculator.

[refulgentis]

up front: this situation is really messed up, this is a close to the opposite of how I got taught to do interviews at google (albeit, nearly a decade later)

conversely, it's reductive to compare it to a generic ban on saying "I don't know"

my first job was a startup I built, starting from being a waiter. There's a lot of people who don't even try, sort of reject the premise of engaging with the question.

Saying "I don't know", then looking at the interviewer, is about the least valuable interaction you can have with an interviewer, and there's a shocking # of people who do that: whether it be freezing up, some sort of implicit commentary on the question, or a form of performance art, whatever the implicit intent is, in 99% of cases, it doesn't serve you at all.

If I ask you how to fluffle nuffle the snorbknobs, you can at least come back with "I don't know, I may have misheard you: I've never heard of fluffle nuffle. Can you give me a hint?". If you're at the end of your rope with tech interviews: "Excuse me, those aren't sensical words, I'm worried you're having a stroke"

"I don't know" and silence is NPC stuff.

[EGG_CREAM]

Fair enough, I have also worked with people like that. On the other end, asking asinine questions with limitations id never have in real life is also NPC stuff. I would say if an interviewer is getting dead eyed “I don’t know” answers a lot, it says something about the questions they are asking as much as the quality of interviewees they are getting.

[kevmo314]

I agree, but as a candidate you don't have much control over the interviewer you get.

[EGG_CREAM]

Sorry, edited my comment to clarify. Your advice is good, I just don’t like that that’s how so many interviews work.

[IncreasePosts]

In the context of the interview, the "I don't know" is said in a situation where there is no coworker or resource to fall back on. These kinds of questions happen all the time, and the business will generally not accept "I didn't know the answer so I abandoned the whole project - sorry". If you don't know the answer, you work to find it, or you try to work around it.

[keiferski]

No, you want to work with people that say, "I don't know, but I think X is true, and here's how I'd find out if that's a correct assumption..."

[EGG_CREAM]

I really don’t, not when the question is something as simple as something I can type into a calculator.

[keiferski]

The purpose of that kind of question is not to get a piece of information, it's to evaluate how you go about solving problems that you don't know the answer to and/or don't have immediately obvious ways (like using a calculator) to find the solution.

[EGG_CREAM]

Your comment has me wondering what it is specifically I find so irksome about the interview question in the blog post. In one of my first interviews they gave me a fairly well know riddle and asked me to work out the answer on a white board in front of them. I had no problem with that, actually I found it pretty fun. There’s something about this question, I haven’t figured it out quite yet, that bothers me more than other analysis questions. Maybe it’s just the flavor the writer added to it, I’ll have to figure that out.

[withinboredom]

Yeah, you type it into a calculator. In what universe would I need to know this answer and NOT type it into a calculator? It isn't because I can't work it out, it's because I am a dumb human who makes mistakes and if I am trying to work out that exact number, it is because it matters. And if it matters, I don't want to fuck it up.

[keiferski]

Well I’m not that interviewer, but I’m pretty sure that getting the exact answer is not really the point of the exercise. Understanding how the candidate thinks, does mental calculations, etc. is the point, and anyone that is hostile to this basic exercise is probably too unpleasant to be a desirable coworker anyway.

[withinboredom]

I don't know if you read that reply as hostile or just saying "hostile in general" but I can promise there was a smile on my face and it wasn't "hostile" at all. The mental calculations is a pointless exercise. Math is so incredibly different than big-system software, and it is more about working memory than anything else, and solving arbitrary math problems won't get you that feedback.