| When I’m interviewing I never ask a question about something I know super well. I circle around what the candidate signals he has great passion and understanding at, and start deep diving into that. If I know about it as well, then we can have a really deep discussion, if I don’t- then I can learn something new. The aim when interviewing is to check how well / deeply the interviewee can think through a problem. If we pick a topic that they don’t have deep knowledge - they can either stumble and freeze emotionally, or hallucinate something just to appear smart. At this point it is an examination not an interview. And sure some people are capable enough to get to an answer, but that’s more of a lottery than a real analysis. It usually boils down to how often have they interviewed before and been in a similar situation. And “people who have interviewed a lot” is hardly a metric I want to optimise for. Now picking something they know or have expressed interest or passion in, this means we are sure to have more signal than noise. If the interviewee’s description is more of a canned response - then I delve deeper or broader. “I’ve managed to solve this issue by introducing caching” - “Great, are there other solutions? How do you handle cache invalidation, what are the limits? What will you do if the load increases 10 fold, would you need to rethink the solution?” |