
What I Learned From Blowing An Interview - braythwayt
http://braythwayt.com/2015/11/23/blowing-an-interview.html
======
Afton
Everything you do in an interview will be judged. Some people will give you an
incomplete problem spec and mark you down if you don't ask questions. Some
will give you the same problem spec, but feel that you were too hesitant to
"just get started" if you ask questions. There is a guessing game going on in
an interview, and while it's not 'just chance' to do well vs poorly, there is
an element of chance involved.

Since there is this element of chance, a 'blown interview' is certainly worth
evaluating, but also not necessarily worth completely changing your process.
You may have just had a bad matchup of expectations.

~~~
jghn
Exactly. There's no game you can play that'll win every scenario because you
can't possibly know how the person on the other side of the table will be
judging you.

I made this realization a while back and decided to make two changes to how I
approached interviews:

\- Be myself. This sounds simple but it's harder than one would think. Most
people are trained to put on faces and airs in these situations, most guides
will tell you how to act, dress, etc. Ignore all that. If they don't like the
real you they're not going to like you long term. There are some people who
will ding you for not acting all prim and proper in an interview situation,
but do you want to work with them?

\- Flip my mentality around. They're the ones that need the selling, not me.
This ties together with the first point but it is a key mentality change. It's
easier to just be yourself and stay calm if you can think about the interview
in terms of you interviewing _them_.

~~~
vdnkh
>Be myself

Super important, and easier said than done. I was too much "myself" during an
interview, and I ended up disparaging their choice of Visual Basic as their
main language (at a trendy startup in 2015) a bit too heavily. Said I passed
the interview except for that bit. Did a similar thing recently during a phone
interview. Another trendy startup who acquired a legacy .NET product and were
looking for engineers to "automate" it. Sorry, I'm not buying what you're
selling.

~~~
rwallace
If you're going to have a policy of being yourself, that needs to go with an
understanding that yourself is mutable, and a policy of changing yourself to
be better adapted to your environment. In this case, it's important to realize
that the days when choice of programming language was very important are long
past. Pay, working conditions, not having to live in a very expensive area are
important. Programming language is a minor detail, not worth getting worked up
about.

~~~
jghn
It depends. There are languages I have no desire to work with and others which
I very much would prefer to work with. It's _a_ factor even if it's no longer
_the_ factor.

------
d23
> The specific problem was that I was speaking of broad patterns and forces,
> when my interlocutors were asking about specific, tangible incidents and
> tools.

Interviewing is a two-way street. If you actually do feel that you were the
ideal candidate based on what they said they were looking for, didn't _they_
blow it as well? When you went high level, did they give any immediate
feedback that indicated you were speaking at a level of abstraction above what
they were looking for? If not, the failure is just as much on them.

~~~
rubidium
The article makes it seem like they were asking those questions, he was just
missing it.

To your blaming the interviewers, part of being VP level is being able to pick
up on stuff like that. He admits he missed it. They may be concerned, as a
result, that he'll "miss it" in other ways too.

Very humble article, and great lesson learned by the author.

~~~
braythwayt
I interview candidates a lot, and I see this pattern many times. I can't
remember how aggressively those particular people followed up with me, but I
can tell you that I have had conversations like this:

\---

 _Tell me about something specific you did to improve the productivity
/velocity of your colleagues._

"I'm a big believer in unit tests. When you have a lot of code coverage, other
people can make changes without worrying they'll break things."

 _Ok, I get that, we write tests too. But what, specifically, did you do with
respect to testing? And what, specifically was the result?_

"Well, I write tests for all my code first. TDD leads to better designs, and
that's better for everyone."

 _I know what TDD is, and I admire people with the discipline to practice it
consistently. Now tell mw what, specifically, you did with TDD to improve the
productivity of the team. Did you introduce the idea? Did you introduce some
process around TDD? Did you introduce some TDD tooling?_

"I use Mock Objects."

~~~
johnrob
Your question seems unexpected, and not necessarily in the charter of every
programming gig. I happen to have a great answer to it, after making big
improvements to build times, but that is pure chance. The comment at the top
of this whole thread has the right idea: sometimes candidates randomly meet
unknown expectations, and sometimes the opposite happens.

~~~
mason55
I don't think his question is unexpected at all for any kind of candidate that
is going to have a leadership component. There are a hundred different answers
that you can give to his initial question (how did you increase velocity of
your teammates). TDD, improved requirements process, improved deployment
process, improved monitoring, improved mentoring process, whatever.

I actually think this is a great way to figure out whether someone has
actually done what they are talking about and done it successfully or if it's
just something they have read about or halfheartedly/unsuccessfully tried to
implement. It's easy to say "agile is good" or "continuous integration is
good" or "TDD is good". If you're going to claim one of those things as a big
accomplishment then you should be able to talk about the specifics of how you
implemented it.

I don't even care if I agree with all your decisions. What I do care about is
why you made your decisions. If you made some decision that caused the company
to go bankrupt but at the time it was the most sensible decision then lets
talk about it. If all you can say is "testing is good because it prevents
bugs" then I would be concerned that you either hadn't implemented a
comprehensive testing program or you didn't understand why you were making the
decisions you made.

------
bayer_rggb
I saw this video where Bryan Cranston gives advice to young actors. He
basically says, don't go into an audition 'looking' for a job, or 'wanting' a
job. Go in, do your thing, portray the best you and get out. If they want you,
you'll get the job, If they don't ... why would you want to work at a place
where they don't want you ?

This was eye opening for me. Totally changed the way I went to interviews.

(Can't find the video now :( )

~~~
pbhjpbhj
>why would you want to work at a place where they don't want you ? //

Because you like to eat food every day?

~~~
Ollinson
Anyone can find a job to survive, even in the depths of a horrible recession.

I suspect the disconnect is a lot of people who say "eat food" really mean
"drive a $60,000 car."

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Anyone? I think you're deceiving yourself there. My point was really that the
comment was clearly from a privileged perspective - not everyone out of work
is just lazy.

Working in a job that's not a perfect fit is a small step down the scale of
compromising one's career out of necessity. Next step would probably be
working on a different industry. Then there is a lot further to go before your
cleaning up other people's mess or faeces, scrubbing abattoir floors, or what-
have-you.

Agreed on your second sentence, but that's a valid choice.

------
acconrad
Honestly, this article is a bit hyperbolic. He didn't _blow_ the interview - I
was expecting an article on being totally unprepared, not able to answer a
single question. What happened was he aced the technical portion, and went too
theoretical / abstract when they wanted things that were concrete /
applicable. That's not blowing it - that's a lack of recent interview
experience, and is something he will easily fix and correct in the next
interviews. But it was refreshing to see that he received actionable feedback
from the interviewers, rather than the straight "sorry we can't move forward"
boilerplate that usually has to happen.

~~~
ohitsdom
Totally agreed.

> Failing so spectacularly in an interview shook me to my core.

He didn't fail spectacularly, he just didn't get the job. He's lucky he got
actionable feedback from a friend to improve. Most bigger companies won't give
a reason for a rejection nowadays for legal reasons.

I, however, have truly failed spectacularly in an interview. While it
temporarily killed my confidence, it did make me a better interviewee in the
long run. I learned the concepts that stumped me in the interview, and I had a
little less fear in the next interview since it couldn't get worse.

~~~
braythwayt
Perhaps instead of "failed spectacularly," I "snatched defeat from the jaws of
victory."

~~~
ohitsdom
That seems like an _incredibly_ accurate description about what happened to
you.

------
Beltiras
I had the weirdest let-down after an interview this summer. Like the author I
thought it had gone fine but something entirely else was going on. The
interviewer let me know the reason I was not chosen was that I used agressive
micro-expressions and lacked diplomacy. I don't know if my love for technical
excellence (a topic broached quite fully during the interview) or my anecdote
of an anti-pattern at a previous employer was really presented with toxicity
but my takeaway is that sometimes you have just been set up for failure and
nothing can be done to salvage your chances.

~~~
mixmastamyk
What are "agressive micro-expressions" ?

~~~
mchu4545
Keeping your arms crossed, moving your head back from the conversation,
tensing of the body, etc.

~~~
chucksmash
If that's what I were worried about then I think I'd just leave it at, "we
didn't feel like our personalities meshed well" or "we don't think you are a
culture fit" and leave it at that.

"Aggressive micro-expressions" sounds aggressively silly.

------
Jemaclus
I interviews around a bit this summer. I found one position that, on paper, I
was the perfect candidate. I ticked every checkbox the hiring manager
mentioned. I met with the hiring manager first, and she loved me and by the
end of the meeting was insisting that I come into the office for an onsite
with her team. A few days later, I went into the onsite and nailed it. I mean,
there were zero indications that I had flopped. By the end of the day, the
hiring manager came in, smiling and asked me the good stuff about salary
expectations, when i could start, etc. All good responses.

Then she said that since this is a senior position, we'd have to run it by the
CTO, who was based across the country. They decided to do a Skype interview.
As soon as the screen came up, I got a sinking feeling in my stomach. The CTO
was relatively hostile and didn't smile throughout the whole session, even
when I cracked a joke that never fails to get a response. By the end, she gave
a terse "Thanks for your time" and that was it.

I didn't get the job.

But this is one of those things where I really believe I put my best foot
forward, and I really believe that I was a great fit for that job, and I
really believe that there was some other factor completely, 100% beyond my
control that caused me not to get the job. Maybe she already had someone in
mind. Maybe she was having a bad day. Maybe I had something stuck in my teeth,
or maybe someone close to her died. Who knows?

I'm still really bummed I didn't get that job, but at the end of the day, it
is what it is, and I have to move forward.

Good luck with your next interview, OP. It'll work out eventually. :)

~~~
DarthMader
What's the joke?

~~~
Jemaclus
So this dyslexic guy walks into a bra...

No, really, it wasn't really a joke, but more of a funny story that almost
everyone laughs at... except this particular CTO. Sigh. I'd explain it here,
but there's some backstory that is required for the story to be funny, and the
backstory is a project that I worked on for a few years. They always want to
know more about that project, so by the time I'm wrapping up the short
explanation, they have enough information to understand why this one thing is
funny.

In retrospect, maybe that suggests that she wasn't really paying attention.
Maybe I just didn't notice. Hmm.

------
didgeoridoo
Reg doesn't go into exactly when this interview occurred, but I have to
imagine it was quite a few years ago. The conversation today should go
something more like:

Interviewer 1: "So, Reginald, how many years of Angular Bootstrap Scrum
experience do you have?"

Interviewer 2: "Fuck off, this is raganwald. You're hired."

~~~
braythwayt
This is from when I knew both programming languages: C++ _and_ Java.

------
badloginagain
Sounds like a bad interview process to me. Crushed the technical interview,
had a glowing recommendation, and "blew" the interview on the whim of a
founder- for talking about root principles no less. And instead of pulling you
back to specifics (ie. _leading_ you to answer the things they're interested
in), the founder dismisses you for failing their totally hidden criteria.

From my perspective, the founders blew the interview, not the interviewee.
Then again, no one ever complains about the interview process on HN...

~~~
brianpgordon
This definitely resonates with me as someone occasionally involved in the
interview process from the other side. In my experience the scariest bits of
"hidden criteria" are brought up under the umbrella of culture fit. Candidates
are posed a minefield of completely non-technical-related open-ended
questions, with the consequence that the interviewer is free to draw
practically any conclusions they want about the candidate's personality and
compatibility with the company. These lines of questioning are impressive to
recount, as if the interviewer is a clairvoyant with exceptional powers of
insight into the candidate's soul. However, I'm skeptical that this process is
any better than random at selecting people who would turn out to be valued,
effective engineers. It seems to me that, unless there are glaring issues with
arrogance/stubbornness/misanthropy, technical chops and engineering skill are
what you should optimize for, not personality.

I've heard of "objective" interviews based on a rubric with a set number of
points for each question and little room for interpretation. I wonder how that
works out. I feel like even if it's pretty bad, the interview is so completely
terrible and broken right now that it might be an improvement.

------
weiclout
I've just blown a technical interview. Not like this though.

I've got lots of experience, know my languages inside out and have several
launched products to millions of people. I did every problem in the
recommended book (CtCI) and know data structures and algorithms well. I wasn’t
prepared for the nerves though.

I interviewed at a large social network recently. 3 out of the 5 onsites went
amazingly well. 1 was okay and the last one totally tanked. It wasn’t a
particularly hard question, but I didn’t crack it immediately so started to
panic.

What made it 10x worse was that the interviewer sat in complete silence, not
responding to any of my ideas. I followed all the recommended strategies:
Throwing out a brute force solution, discussing what you are thinking
(incidentally, I said the correct solution very early on!), trying different
data structures - but he said nothing and checked his phone.

When I got the call, I was absolutely devastated. I had put 3 months of
preparation into this and it was all gone in 30 minutes. The recruiter
couldn’t believe it as he thought I was a shoe-in. I told him about the
interviewer and he was furious. He said he would pass that on as feedback, but
there was nothing he could do - they have to respect the process.

I appreciate the humility in this article. As much as I want to blame the
interviewer, the process, how technical interviews are broken, how that
company isn’t all that, etc etc - the most fruitful thing I can do is learn
what went wrong and how I can overcome it next time.

In repairing my shattered self confidence, I’ve found this very helpful:

“Doing poorly on your Google interview could mean a couple things, if you're a
good engineer….Which of the two evaluations is more meaningful? A) A few hours
with busy people who don't know you trying to guess how good you are, with
only a few minutes of a problem they're familiar with as a probe. B) Years of
successful performance in your career.

[https://www.quora.com/I-felt-I-was-a-pretty-good-software-
en...](https://www.quora.com/I-felt-I-was-a-pretty-good-software-engineer-
with-a-successful-career-but-I-did-quite-poorly-in-my-Google-interview-does-
this-mean-Im-not-as-good-an-engineer-as-I-thought?srid=z06&share=f787395d)

~~~
rwallace
It's worth remembering that studies have shown the hire/no hire decision has
in most cases been made no later than ten seconds after you walk into the
room, and your experience confirms that. So:

1\. Don't fret too much about how you answer some arcane technical question.
That's probably not going to be the deciding factor.

2\. Research ways to give a good first impression.

3\. Practice not visibly stumbling or looking nervous during the interview.

4\. Accept that sometimes the decision will have been made before you show up
for reasons that have nothing to do with you (e.g. your competitor will get
the job because his dad called in a favor or suchlike).

5\. When it becomes clear that a no-hire decision has been made, call a halt
early - it's perfectly okay to say halfway through the interview, "But I think
you've already made your decision, so let's call it here." It won't make a
difference to the outcome this time, but it will protect your self-esteem and
thereby improve your performance in future interviews.

~~~
gaylemcd
I'd like to see these studies and how, if at all, they relate to the technical
interview process. I would strongly guess "not at all."

Technical interviews are in fact technical. There is zero technical evaluation
that happens in the first 10 seconds.

As for your specific points: 1\. Yes, in fact, how you answer the technical
questions will very likely be the deciding factor. That almost always was when
I was doing technical interviews and on Google's hiring committee. 2\. First
impressions really don't matter that much for a technical interview... unless
you're talking about the first 5 - 10 minutes of the technical portion. 3\.
For technical interviews, _looking_ nervous doesn't really get people rejected
-- at least not at companies like Google and Facebook. It could, however, make
an interviewer more forgiving. 4\. When candidates get rejected for coding
roles companies like Google and Facebook, it's almost always due to their
interview performance. It would be very unusual to get rejected because
someone else outperformed you. They don't evaluate interviews that way. 5\.
Absolutely do not call off an interview part way through because you assume
that the person is going to reject you. You don't know that at all. People's
perception of their performance during a technical interview has no
correlation with how they actually did. If you call off the interview because
you assume you're doing poorly, this might just be your best interview.

Also, a single anecdote does not confirm a theory. It can _align with_ a
theory.

~~~
weiclout
Thanks Gayle. And thanks also for the huge amount of detail and care in your
book. It is meticulous and brilliant.

What would you advise for the situation above? The rejection was certainly as
a result of my actual coding performance, but I felt like the interviewer
played a significant part. The company (strongly) encourages use of your book
so I presumed the interviewer would encourage dialogue, give suggestions, give
feedback, etc. He gave me a Leetcode question, answered my first question with
a smirk ("what output format did he want from the function"), and sat in
silence while I threw out ever suggestion I could think of.

Am I just deceiving myself? Do other people push through that awkwardness and
disdain?

Anyway - thanks again. I appreciate your book and advice.

------
jmount
'I contacted my friend. What went wrong? He sighed. “The founders thought you
were too theoretical. They got the sense you would be a great coach or
evangelist, but lacked the hands-on attitude they were looking for to actually
build a team up.”'

They may have been looking for one specific response (and yes, if so they
should have directly asked) such as "do you have experience hiring?"

------
im_down_w_otp
One of my favorite things about how companies interview is how they assume
their own competence in actually assessing people at a level that is woefully
out of line with reality.

For example. "We ask puzzle questions because it helps us figure out how a
candidate problem solves."

No it doesn't, and not because puzzles are a bad way to assess problem
solving, but because you as the interviewer have basically no idea what you're
doing when performing the assessment.

Typically the interviewer has no clear idea what profile of person they
actually need to hire for a given type of job function. Even in the rare case
they do have that necessary understanding, they almost certainly have zero
training in how to create or identify puzzles that actually align with the
kinds of problem solving that match the profile they're looking for. The
interviewer will have zero training on what to observe about how the person
solves problems and what the signals actually mean. They'll instead almost
certainly pick up all the wrong signals and miss all the important ones and
interpret the ones they picked up in the wrong way.

Usually people tell me they ask certain kinds of puzzle or programming
questions because they want to see how the person solves problems,
collaborates, communicates, etc. As a quick litmus test I always respond,
"When you ask these puzzle questions to your candidates do you already know
the answers?" 100% of the time, "Yes, of course." To which I say, "If you
already know the answer, you're unable to remove your bias from the way of
coming to the solution, and you're learning absolutely nothing about how they
communicate or collaborate. Next time ask them a puzzle you don't know the
answer to and work on the solution together. Then you'll have half a chance at
learning something valuable about the candidate."

------
seanwilson
I don't think you should read into it so much to be honest. Everyone looks for
different things when giving interviews. You can't please everyone.

Also, you say things like "When being interviewed, we must make sure that when
asked to speak in specifics, we answer in specifics"...the interviewer should
be nudging you in the right direction if you're veering off track. If they
don't and judge you for it, they're not doing their part in my opinion.

------
msutherl
Did no one else catch the irony that the entire post is itself a
generalization based on a specific experience?

~~~
braythwayt
I wrote an essay describing a general principle, using a specific example from
my experience, and closing with specific strategies to employ.

~~~
msutherl
Not a criticism – I enjoyed the piece! Indeed, since you were not asked for a
specific example, and after all it is your own blog, you are free to share a
generalization without violating anyone's expectations.

------
modarts
That company appears to be pretty bad at hiring executive technical
management.

------
vinceguidry
I thought this was a very insightful article. I had always thought that for
those upper-level positions, you would necessarily be talking more about
philosophy and mindset than about specific instances. The idea being that you
wouldn't be there if your fundamentals didn't stack up.

A lot of advice gets bandied about regarding interviews, and worse, a lot of
people seem to think it's just a random walk, but really an interview is
nothing more than a specific instance of exercising persuasion. Maybe you're
successful, maybe you're not, but there's reasons why in either case. Coming
to an understanding of all the angles is precisely the benefit of experience.
Articles like this help me to understand what the game looks like.

------
kafkaesq
_I went through all five stages of grief in one conversation: Anger, Denial,
Bargaining, Depression, and finally, Acceptance. I blew it. Okay, I had lost
this chance. But what could I learn for the next time?_

Why have we (as candidates) allowed ourself to become so brow-beaten over the
years as to nearly always conclude that if an employer fails to read us, that
it's automatically because of something _we_ did to "blow it"? That we're the
ones who need to pick ourselves up, dust ourselves of, and wallow through a
necessary period of mourning and self-reflection before promising ourselves to
do better next time?

Long, painful lesson learned: _it 's a two-way street_. The interviewers', and
the company's overall performance in the process is just as much open to
evaluation -- and question -- as that of the candidate. And guess what --
they're just as likely to make mistakes as the candidate; perhaps even more so
-- because they've internalized the idea that as the one on the hiring side,
they're the ones with X-ray vision to what determines a "perfect fit"; so that
if turns out the candidate doesn't hit all the markers they're looking for,
then by definition, it's because something the candidate did to screw
everything up.

In this case, it looks like it may have been the company which "blew it" in
passing on this guy. Or maybe not -- we have no way of telling from this
distance, and it would be moot to speculate. But I would like to hope that we
can get past this tendency to automatically beat ourselves

As an aside -- aren't logic problems "over" now, for any but junior positions?
Even for senior developers I'd consider them something of a red flag -- a sign
that the company doesn't really know why it's doing what it's doing in the
hiring process, and is cut-and-pasting from what it thinks other companies are
doing.

And at the VP level? Reason enough to look the interviewer in the eye, explain
(nicely) that you don't think these questions are a good use of their time or
yours -- then to thank them for the opportunity, and walk out the door.

~~~
braythwayt
This was approximately fifteen years ago. And it wasn't just any old
interview, it was for a company where a friend worked.

I wanted to work with my friend, I wanted to work on the problem they were
solving. I was so excited about the opportunity that I was actually
considering moving from Toronto to California just to work there.

But yeah, we should not normally be this invested in the outcome of a job
interview.

------
lazyant
There's a good chance that the same interview (same questions and answers)
with another company would pass and be a 'great fit', since they were looking
for different things etc, there's always the lottery aspect.

------
gaius
There is plenty of evidence that people make up their minds in 10 seconds and
the rest is post-hoc justification. You didn't blow it, they just didn't like
you, or already had someone else in mind.

------
Alex3917
> When talking with others, be aware of when they want to understand the
> specifics, and when they want to understand the general ideas.

I think this might be the wrong takeaway. In reality when people say they want
specific examples then they want specific examples, and when they say they
want general principles they also want specific examples.

If they ask for a general principle then maybe throw that in as the last
sentence, but most people people simply aren't able to process abstract ideas,
even if they think they're able to.

------
ryandrake
You should consider yourself lucky that you had a way to get actual feedback
through a side channel. At most tech companies in the Bay Area, you only know
it's a "NO" when you don't hear a word back from them after a few weeks.
Rarely, you'll get a generic "Sorry, but your skills are not a match for our
position at this time" form E-mail, which although nice, is not really
helpful. Good, actionable feedback is very valuable, especially in today's
lukewarm job market.

------
wrs
Speaking as one person who has been interviewing developers (and others) for
20 years, getting to specifics is something I try to do in every interview.

It's just not that difficult to B.S. your way through an interview with great-
sounding generalities even when you don't know how to actually _do_ anything
(think FizzBuzz). It's also an actual problem in real life that some people
would rather live in the abstract and never want get into the details of
actually getting work done.

The only way I know to clarify that in an interview is to drill way deep into
the specifics of something you've done. If you actually did the work, and knew
what you were doing, then that'll be pretty obvious -- and you can certainly
motivate the specifics with principles as you go.

However, quite often I have to really push to get the specifics even if they
are there. People don't expect that I want to be bored with details, or
something. So I've learned to be very explicit that I _want_ boring details,
lots of them. It sounds like the interviewers in this case didn't do that,
whether deliberately or not.

------
mixmastamyk
So lucky to get some feedback. I've been on several interviews this year for
positions I was well qualified but didn't get. I've gotten zero feedback.

Sounds like the writer was qualified. How many good hires are lost because
they have only a single interview and there is a misunderstanding?

------
steven2012
I don't know, it sounds more like the interviewers didn't know how to actually
interview someone properly. If they have questions they want specifically
answered, they should ask them, not just sit around like a meek wallflower.

It could be that the OP just prattled on and on, and bored each of his
interviewers and went off topic. If that's the case, then it makes sense,
because we've all worked with people like that. But if the OP is actually a
great candidate, and the interviewers passed on them because the interviewers
didn't lead the discussion in the way they wanted, that's their fault, not
his.

------
d0m
Like raising money, you should trust the "No", but not the "Why". There are so
many factors that comes into hiring, most of them totally unrelated to you or
your performance during the interview.

------
justinhj
You can't win them all. In another interview the same behaviour the author
exhibited in the article could be seen in a positive light "he always sees the
big picture not the specific tools, which implies deeper knowledge"

If the interview answer is going off track, it's the interviewers prerogative
to ask for more specifics and clarification, if that's what they want to learn
about the candidate

I think you have to be very aware as both an interviewer and interviewee of
assumptions you're making about a person and dig deeper to ensure you are
right

------
lzecon
Great post. I've seen feedback from hundreds and hundreds of interviews, both
technical and non, and by far the most common reason for rejecting someone is
they did not answer the interviewer's question directly.

Speaking in specifics is important, but more broadly, you didn't do well
because you didn't actually answer the question asked. People often get
tripped up in their explaination of the answer, or their theory or thinking
behind it and just forget to say what they actually did.

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mrdrozdov
@braythwayt, if you don't mind answering, when was the interview? and did your
current employer know you were interviewing?

~~~
braythwayt
It was around the turn of the century.

I'd prefer not to talk too much about what was going on at my employer-of-the-
time. Let's just say that I've maintained a good relationship with my
colleagues and managers from that company over the intervening years.

~~~
mrdrozdov
Thank you for the candid response.

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treve
It's funny that the behavior that caused the author to blow the interview is
also perfectly demonstrated in the article. The author moves from a specific
issue (not correctly anticipating what the the interviewer wants to hear) to
generalizing in a much broader context ;)

~~~
braythwayt
...But then returned to specifics at the end.

:-)

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BurningFrog
One weird thing I notice is how people say "countries such as Spain and
Greece" when they actually mean "Spain and Greece".

Do they feel like speaking in generalities is more prestigious? Is it as a
hedge in case there are more examples they don't know about?

~~~
mod
I notice that a lot in political debates.

"Socialism is working very well in countries such as Sweden, for example."

I think it's usually an attempt to infer that there are many more similar
situations.

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mixmastamyk
That's another failing of tech interviews, you normally get only one chance to
perform.

It is a bit like having one chance to write a correct program, without
possibility of iteration/debugging. How often will this produce a correct
result? Rarely.

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hobaak
I am more impressed with your project management experience with agile. Did
you follow agile process strictly in that company? I love to hear your
experience and can be new blog post.

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coderKen
really learnt a lot from reading this. Thanks for sharing.

