

An interview question you had better know how to answer - amrith
http://hypecycles.wordpress.com/2009/09/30/interview-questions/

======
Ennis
I disagree with everyone who commented on HN and on the guy's site.

The point of asking someone about their past failure is not to put them on the
spot and test their oratorical skills. It's not to see how they overcame
failures and ended up successful. There are easier ways to find these things
out. Ask for an essay or ask directly about how they fixed a bad situation.

When asked about your past failures, the aim is to find out if you actually
grasped why you were a failure. You can fail and recover many times in your
life without ever figuring out why you were failed by someone and what the
hell happened. Too often a failure is seen as passing a checklist (Sell X
units, ship by X date, Fix X bugs). It doesn't matter if you failed or
succeeded before. If you've made it to the interview then none of that counts
anymore.

Failure is about self-reflection. Let me say that again. Successful failure is
about self-reflection. It takes a great amount of maturity to grasp failure
and come out ahead (and this doesn't mean getting a pass from someone).
Failure is about initiative to learn and look back at the story.

I'll say it another way. There are 2 ways you can learn. First is formal.
Someone teaches you or you teach yourself. You apply the material and get a
pass or fail. That is how school is done. It's how most things are learnt and
taught. Everyone knows how to do this.

The second way of learning is what they call learning from your mistakes. Make
no mistake about it - It's not easy and there is a specific way to do it. Most
people can explain what the failure was and how to fix it. It takes effort and
plenty of time and contemplation to analyse the experience. That's the first
step. The second step is to take that new understanding and grow as a person
because of it. Again, there is a method to this. You practice it and look at
the results.

Studying your failures is usually left to the subconscious by most people. If
you can do it or even if you know that you need to and seek outside help to
self-reflect then you are a mile ahead of most people when it comes to self-
management.

You are asked about failure to find out how much self development you do.
People that work hard on themselves like no other and who also want to work at
your company are likely very good and you should hire them.

~~~
sriramk
I think this is a bogus question. In fact, any of these expected questions can
be well prepared for. If someone asked me this in an interview which I wanted
to 'game' for some reason, I would spin a yarn about how I failed, learnt from
my mistakes and am now a well-rounded, stronger human being.

But in the real world, failure doesn't work like that. You fail at times for
no obvious reason. You fail sometimes and you have no idea what lessons you
are supposed to learn. You fail at times and you know you can't fix that part
of your personality.

The only interesting variant on this question I can think of (that I have used
is) - disaster stories in technology. Everyone has one (if they don't, you
should be suspicious) and you can find out a lot by the way they describe it.

~~~
cturner
The things people say indicate that they know what is expected of them.

"Do you think it's important to comment your code?" Someone who answers yes to
that even when in practice they tend downgrade the value of it is involved in
an important exchange. They are showing the interviewer that they respect
their priorities. And if they are hired, they have set an expectation.

These discussions set an agenda. It's weaker that than the contracts you'll
sign, but far stronger than nothing at all. And it is a useful filter for
excluding people with a different worldview who are not going to work in the
team.

I've disqualified myself in a couple of interview cycles for not playing the
game on gang of four patterns. Yes, I could sit down and memorise them and
pretend it was important, no I'm going to because that sets an agenda that is
too far away from the way I work. Everyone has won through those hires not
going ahead.

------
jacquesm
I don't have much experience interviewing people, I only hired in total about
40 or so, and interviewed maybe twice that. One thing I've never done though
is to go into an interview with a prepared list of questions.

First I would try to get a feeling for the personality of the person applying
for he job, to see if they would fit in, then I'd try to gage whether or not
they had the required background for the job, and I might follow up with a
question or two about that background.

A few people were caught fibbing and the interview was gracefully terminated.
But for the most part, the people that showed up were honest and fairly candid
about what they could and could not do. I've never felt the need to resort to
'trick' or 'puzzle' questions or questions that were meant to trip them up.

Psychological games with people that are already nervous tend to have weird
outcomes, better to get them to be relaxed and to tell you what you need to
know freely.

One guy even admitted to having stolen some office supplies from a previous
employer (he had a hole in his resume).

The employer fired him on the spot but he was very capable, he'd learned his
lesson and I ended up hiring him, he was quite amazed at being hired and was
one of the best people we ever had working for us. And honest to a fault,
certainly learned his lesson.

A couple of months ago one of my not-so-successful hires sent me a long letter
of apology about some stupid stuff he'd pulled many years ago. I'd long since
forgiven and forgotten, but it's quite amazing how decent most people are deep
down. As an employer your main role is to bring that out in people. If you
start by casting the relationship in terms of trick questions and such I think
you're off on the wrong foot.

But then again, that seems to be the norm, so maybe I'm the one that's in the
wrong. I haven't had people working for me for the last 4 years, and I don't
think I ever will again, but still I wouldn't change much in the way of
conducting interviews.

Probably the size of the organization doing the interviewing is a major factor
in the process. If you have 50 applicants for a job or 3 that would make a
huge difference in the approach.

~~~
elblanco
I wish I could agree more with more upvotes. One of the most important factors
IMHO when hiring people is their personality and ability to work with the
team. A battery of quiz, psych and trivia questions does little to reveal
anything related to that other than what a person's stress tolerances are.

I usually just interview as a conversation. Likely I'm going to have to be
able to talk to this person regularly anyways. Once that happens, they relax
and I've found that their background claims tend to be far more realistic,
more willing to point out their faults, and yet still have plenty of ability
to discuss deep technical questions as well. But now it's not 20 questions
it's "can you whiteboard the architecture of that project your were mentioning
a few minutes ago?" And then use that as a point of discussion, e.g. "well why
did you do it this way vs. this way?" They should be able to provide a
reasonable answer.

Really what most employers want is somebody who's able to think deeply,
justify their own thought process, demonstrate the ability to research and
general technical acumen. Most likely their technical history won't be a 1:1
match for what your company does anyway, so they'll simply have to learn a
number of new languages or development metaphors, use cases, architectures
etc.

------
sunir
In my experience, this is a crappy question because interviewees tend to prep
for it. It's way better to ask people about the history of a project they
worked on, what challenges they faced, how they overcame it, etc. Stories of
failures usually arise from that.

Well, they should anyway. Some people try to dance around their failures, but
those are no-hires. Confident candidates don't even think to not talk about
their failures because it's all part of what made them successful.

~~~
gaius
You'd be surprised. The last few candidates I interviewed claimed never to
have failed at anything. They also never had a time when they felt unmotivated
at work, and had never argued with their manager or cow-orkers, and never made
a mistake that affected a production system.

The real value of the question is that it tells you if this is the sort of
person who only says what they think you want to hear, not the truth.

~~~
ams6110
I participated in the interview of a dev candidate who had the same answer. "I
really can't think of anything I've failed at." This was so implausible that
on the basis of that answer alone I voted "no hire"

------
swombat
Funnily enough, after rolling with start-ups for a couple of years, you have
enough material to spend hours answering this question.

------
bonsaitree
This is a bad, bad, question because it doesn't structure the response towards
learning about the candidate's thought processes and pre-stages the context of
their response as a value judgment.

At best, you'll get a narrative about a specific project context and the
candidate's actions which resulted in "failure". At worst, you'll get a
disingenuous canned response from someone trying to game the interview and
frame the chosen scenario as "success".

A better phrasing would be:

"Please tell me about a project experience when a plan, scenario, or design
didn't unfold as originally intended."

The candidate can frame their response as "success", "failure",
"improvisation", etc. and this opens up avenues to explore their thought
processes, strategy, and 'leadership style' when responding to novel
scenarios. This is also an opportunity to weigh the candidate's level of
disclosure and frank communications as to what sorts of value judgments they,
themselves, apply to the chosen scenario and their qualitative reactions to
it.

------
hugothefrog
Echoing the statements that others have made, I think this is a crappy
question. When I get asked it, I tend to ask straight back what the
interviewer means by 'failure'. Usually they have their own slant on it, which
means you can answer pitch your response correctly

If I failed at something - as in made a mistake, for which I then corrected, I
don't consider it a failure - it's called learning. If I failed at something,
and _didn't_ learn from it, or at least didn't learn how to correct for the
failure, then I probably didn't know I failed at it - and I certainly wouldn't
be able to articulate anything about it.

------
mavelikara
> “Tell me about something that you failed at and what you learned from it”.
> [..] Folks, if you plan to go to an interview, please think about this in
> advance and have a good answer to this one.

If you are not getting honest answers, you might want to "tune" your question.
If you really care about the answer, IMHO, the best way to ask this question
is by discussing the topic of how _your firm_ has failed in the past and what
_you_ have learned from it. If the candidate thinks that the description is an
honest one, they might reply to your question with honesty.

------
wallflower
Interviews can be hacked, since there is always an objective. Particularly the
behavioral-based interviewing technique 'tell me about a time'. Really, if you
don't know about the STAR interviewing method, you're putting yourself at a
disadvantage. All HR professionals know about it; Please google it or ask a
friend who works in HR. It helps your interview perfomance if you know what
they're filtering for. A very common filter is leadership - have you
demonstrated it. Followed closely by problem solving and creativity.

~~~
ScottWhigham
Yes, however aren't we all (at least those of us on this board) looking for
the personality type that can specifically do just that?

------
chrischen
One time I was walking out of the supermarket and ran into the glass sliding
door. I'm not sure what I'd learned though.

~~~
nostrademons
You didn't learn to watch where you're going? I'd think that'd be a rather
valuable lesson...

~~~
eru
I ran into a glass door once, too. But not into the flat part, but into the
slender side. I bled a lot. (And I learned something --- next time I ran into
something it was a post box, and not a glass door.)

~~~
swombat
I'll give you a free tip: avoid running into things (unless they're attractive
members of the opposite sex).

~~~
eru
I gave up on running in things [0] frequently when I turned eight or so. That
was a long time ago. I even mastered the art of reading books while walking.

[0] To be more precise, things that I do not want to run into.

~~~
jacquesm
I liked to read so much I would read on the way to school.

This worked well until one day a lamppost decided to jump out right in front
of me (me, age 6, bleeding profusely, very pissed off at not being able to
read with the blood spouting everywhere).

Since then I don't read while mobile. I can't wait for my car to drive itself,
that way I'd have lots more time to read (I _still_ love to read).

~~~
eru
Apropos reading. I just finished Larry Nieven's Ringworld. I only noticed that
it was written in 1970 halfway through the book.

~~~
jacquesm
If you're in to old sf try to find 'The Space Merchants' by Pohl and
Kornbluth.

~~~
eru
Thanks. I'm into P.K. Dick's stuff, too. I read everything I could find in the
local library. But since I just moved, they may be more here.

I'll check out 'The Space Merchants'.

------
RyanMcGreal
That was worth reading if only for this clever comment:

> Dave just got pwnt.

[http://hypecycles.wordpress.com/2009/09/30/interview-
questio...](http://hypecycles.wordpress.com/2009/09/30/interview-
questions/#comment-192)

------
rimantas
I guess suggesting to read [http://37signals.com/svn/posts/1555-learning-from-
failure-is...](http://37signals.com/svn/posts/1555-learning-from-failure-is-
overrated) would not count as a good answer :(

------
dhughes
A stiff canned question deserves a stiff canned response.

