I have a personal anecdote related to the "say 'I don't know, but I'll find out'" point. Back when I was super fresh out of college -- like 6 months or so -- I applied for my first tech-related job, as an assistant instructor for a 6-month MERN stack coding bootcamp. During the first phone interview, I was asked a question about jQuery that I didn't know the answer to. Worse still, I had gotten stuck babysitting at the last minute, so I was doing this interview from a park bench, with no computer in sight to Google it (except the phone I was using for the interview), and the wind was so noisy I kept having to ask the interviewer to repeat himself over and over.
I was sure it had been a disaster, but when the interview was over, I was still curious about how to do the jQuery thing, so I looked it up. A couple weeks later, I was given a second phone interview, with a different interviewer, and at some point during that interview I mentioned that I hadn't known the answer to a question last time, but I looked it up and knew it now (and of course I explained the solution). I'm sure that wasn't the only deciding factor, but the interviewer sounded impressed, and after that interview I got the job.
Fast-forward many years, and I've been privileged enough to be the technical interviewer for a handful of hiring decisions. And you know what I look for when I interview people? Not only "do they know the stuff?", but "how do they think about the stuff, how do they solve problems, and are they eager to ask me questions when they don't understand something?" I would much rather recommend or hire someone who knows 70% of the job but is eager to ask about and research the other 30% than someone who knows 90% of the job but pretends they know the other 10% and refuses to ask for help.
(Or worse, another real experience: someone who not only pretends to know the answers when they don't, but actively Googles the question in the middle of the phone interview, then reads off a totally wrong and irrelevant answer because while trying to sound smart, they don't even understand what they're reading. That guy did not get hired. Before you ask: yes, we know he did it, because we heard him typing as he hemmed and hawed before answering.)
I was sure it had been a disaster, but when the interview was over, I was still curious about how to do the jQuery thing, so I looked it up. A couple weeks later, I was given a second phone interview, with a different interviewer, and at some point during that interview I mentioned that I hadn't known the answer to a question last time, but I looked it up and knew it now (and of course I explained the solution). I'm sure that wasn't the only deciding factor, but the interviewer sounded impressed, and after that interview I got the job.
Fast-forward many years, and I've been privileged enough to be the technical interviewer for a handful of hiring decisions. And you know what I look for when I interview people? Not only "do they know the stuff?", but "how do they think about the stuff, how do they solve problems, and are they eager to ask me questions when they don't understand something?" I would much rather recommend or hire someone who knows 70% of the job but is eager to ask about and research the other 30% than someone who knows 90% of the job but pretends they know the other 10% and refuses to ask for help.
(Or worse, another real experience: someone who not only pretends to know the answers when they don't, but actively Googles the question in the middle of the phone interview, then reads off a totally wrong and irrelevant answer because while trying to sound smart, they don't even understand what they're reading. That guy did not get hired. Before you ask: yes, we know he did it, because we heard him typing as he hemmed and hawed before answering.)