[mp3jeep01]

When I first started work out of college I kept a notebook of "things I like/don't like" about my managers, mostly as a training piece for myself. One of the top qualities one of my managers had was his comfort level with admitting to me "I don't know the answer to that, but I think I know where we can find it".

Probably summed up as something like "check your ego at the door". This goes for not only managers, but any member of an organization -- pretending to know something when you really don't and being afraid to ask questions is a huge red flag to me for both managers and employees alike.

And back to the list, IMO that's a pretty good list, especially coming from one person's experiences.

[lugg]

Piecemeal advice, even if you know the answer to all job interview questions answering a straight up "no haven't dealt with that before but I'd tackle it by learning x y z." Will set you apart from pretty much everyone. Being able to confidently tell someone you politely have no fucking clue is pretty rare in my experience.

Example I interviewed for a job I know I was qualified for, they kept asking questions about things I really had no idea about (all stuff I had never dealt with before - only similar things) they were so refreshed by the honesty and how I dealt with not knowing things they offered me the job despite pretty much what I thought at the time was tanking the interview.

[nostrademons]

I used to interview people for Google, and "I don't know but here's how I would go about finding out" almost never counted against candidates. What would count against a candidate is if they made a wrong assumption and then blindly proceeded as if that assumption was correct.

[mgkimsal]

What if they said they'd bing for the answer? Would that count against them?

[nostrademons]

I think that's happened before, not for one of my interviews but for one a friend gave. I don't think it counted against them, but they weren't good enough to meet the bar anyway. (That happens a lot - I've never had a non-intern candidate get through, and I've had friends go for 50 interviews without a single candidate getting hired.) We had a good laugh afterwards.

[lugg]

Why would it count against them theyed still get google search results.

[neumann]

Similar experience. I've had two job interviews where I answered a lot of the questions with, "I have no experience with that, how does it work?" or "Not sure, but sounds interesting". In one case they asked me to complete a technical challenge while watching over my shoulder using their tech stack just to see how I would try to solve their problems not a CS 101 exam question - which I would just google anyways). It was a great interview process. We discussed my approach during it, they helped me understand their method, we got to see what it would be like working together. In both job interviews I was offered the position, not based on my immediate IT skill tree, but character compatibility and demonstrated ability to learn.

[noisy_boy]

This hit too close to home. As a subordinate and as a manager, I've always felt totally comfortable saying, "I'm not sure but I'll check this".

As a subordinate, it was quite annoying to deal with one of the worst managers in my career - I call him the "pretender". I already have plenty to do, and no I don't want to spend time on "checking if too many ping requests from other machines caused harddisk space on this machine to get full" (not joking, true story). The "pretender" had a title of "senior project manager" and the only thing true about that was the "senior" part (nothing against competent seniors), hemmed and hawed in the meetings pretending he knew what he was talking about and basically dumped it all on me.

Once I moved up and stopped reporting to him, he had nobody to dump work on, got exposed and last I heard, left.

[snorkel]

Pretenders are my favorite type of manager to mess with. When they ask if ping requests filled up the disk I would gladly "check" that for them using the "system diagnostic regression suite" and ... nope ... everything looks good there ... But hmmmm ... Seems there was a power surge in the cloud layer ... You better inform upper management that there may a tornado forming in the cloud!!! If you can't argue with stupid at least have some fun with it.