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> 2) If you don’t know the answer, are you at least curious enough to ask what the answer is and have a conversation about it?

This is a bad test. People might be too nervous to ask, especially if they just feel like they've failed a test.

You're testing for "is this person comfortable in an interview setting", not for "is this person curious enough".



True. Managing the nervousness of awkward engineers during interviews is a whole topic in itself.


In fact, I'd wager that one of an interviewer's primary goals should to find a way to fully disregard someone's interviewing skill. Search hard for questions that a sweaty super-nervous introvert would be able to do just as well as a confident natural talker. Find wording that lets you give hints / explain the question better without the interviewee going "oh no, a hint, that means i failed this step!".

I personally think this is very hard to get right, but it has to be a top prio. It's much harder (and much more valuable) than cooking up a sufficiently difficult whiteboard coding question.




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