[jawns]

I can probably go into great detail if we're talking about a project I worked on in the past 3-6 months. But beyond that, the details of past work start to become fuzzier. So if I encounter an interviewer like this, I'd better hope that my most recent project fits the bill, because I'd probably stumble through it for earlier projects.

[iparaskev]

I agree that is hard to remember every little detail for every project you have worked on, but I can definitely recollect how I approached the biggest problems on almost every project. Usually these are the ones worth talking about.

[stronglikedan]

That's nice and all, but you sound young (less than middle aged) if that's the case. Get 20-30 years of projects under your belt and try that, lol. Anyway, cherish it while you can, and have some empathy for those that no longer can, please and thanks!

[walkabout]

I would have to think a really long time to come up with an answer to “describe a hard problem you’ve solved” at all. I might have to consult notes. After that, to make it an interview-friendly narrative, I’d have to fill in a lot of details with plausible speculation because god knows I don’t actually remember (and I don’t really trust memory very much, anyway)

The joys of age plus extremely-poor autobiographical memory.

It doesn’t help that what I think of as actually hard, day to day, is shit like documentation from FAANG companies lying to me and wasting a whole fucking day of my time, terrible error messages, mismanagement of upstream projects, bureaucracy making a two-day task take four weeks, and, in some common ecosystems, awful design of core tools and major libraries, or horribly wasteful library churn. “Hard problems” are nothing next to bullshit problems.

[anal_reactor]

My career isn't long, about five years, but so far I haven't encountered a technical problem that wouldn't be trivial. Like, "just follow whatever ChatGPT says" trivial. The real challenge are people problems - corporate work teaches you that the real tough shit is surviving being surrounded by idiots.

[walkabout]

Not a lot comes to mind that really falls between “basically trivial” and “you’re gonna need to hire a team of PhDs” or “you have accidentally asked me to write a custom distributed file system, and you probably don’t want to pay for that”

Which is to say that usually the hard stuff is an accidental request that nobody actually wants to pay for, so the only thing “hard” about it is recognizing that the client/stakeholder has wandered into territory they really ought not.

[iparaskev]

Yes you are certainly right that it will be much harder the more years of experience you have.

That said, I think that someone could remember a few things for past projects when preparing for an interview. Of course doing that on the spot might be very hard.

[AnimalMuppet]

In my last interview, they asked me what the worst bug I ever had was. I had no trouble remembering, even though it was a decade ago.

The ordinary stuff I worked on last month? Don't bother asking any details; they're gone.