After tenure, he said, things will be going right back to the way they were in the old country.
To put it differently, would I get a better score in OS design than Linus Torvalds? After all, he wrote an operating system that contains bugs, while I wrote no operating system as all.
An even better interviewer will make that clear, by telling you "there's no trick here", "I don't know the answer myself, let's see what we can figure out", or "there's no one right answer, I just want to know what you can see here". A trick I've employed a fair bit lately to get a reserved interviewee to start working with a question is "What is the worst solution we could provide to attack this problem?" I'll even possibly go as far as offering my own horrible solution, and asking them where we fo to improve on this.
And I do mean worst. I haven't met a candidate yet who can't at least throw out ideas on how to improve my horrible solutions, and at that point the ball is rolling.
I interviewed some folks a while ago for a simple desktop support position and I had a lot of trouble getting anything out of the candidates. It's possible that they were all just terrible, but I'm guessing it was more probably my approach.
I gave them a very simple test[1], and I was met with sort of deer-in-headlights stares. Hence forth I think I'll start with a problem and an example horrible solution.
[1]Presented the applicant with a screenshot from a desktop computer that couldn't connect to the internet. The screenshot showed several possible indicators (impossible network settings, cable unplugged, etc...).
Permitting "I don't know" doesn't actually seem to help candidates get more correct answers in the study (looking at the actual paper, the group discouraged from saying "I don't know" actually got a slightly higher number of questions right at the first time of asking)
It simply means those encouraged to say "I don't know" guess wrongly fewer times - no surprises there - whilst still revealing their ignorance to the interviewer.
Applied to job interviews: interviewing people for a job by asking simple factual questions the interviewer knows the answer to is doing it wrong. If they're indiscriminately negatively marking "wrong" answers that aren't prefaced with an explanation that guessing is inadvisable, they're doing it even more wrong - how candidates answer questions they don't know is valuable decision making heuristic.
A more usual interview will involve many questions where there is no clear "correct" answer, in which case "I don't know" will usually be one of the worst possible answers. Even where the questions are fact-based, a decent interviewer should usually give more credit for how a person guesses than an admission of ignorance, in which case "I don't know" is neutral at best. Sure, some candidates that aren't good at guessing or are especially bad at bullshitting will appear worse than if they're encouraged to say "I don't know", but that's valuable information for the interviewer which lost by encouraging everyone to give a non-answer. Same applies if humility is a key requirement and "I don't know" actually is a decent answer.
TLDR: Since correct answers are unaffected, allowing candidates to say "I don't know" only improves the interview performance of weak candidates.
I am not convinced that throwing INTERCAL at a candidate is a good way to roll. ;)
But seriously, I think that you are spot-on with this approach. Interviewing, done effectively, is about getting a fleshed out idea of the capabilities of the candidate, not just getting correct answers. Perhaps the best response to give or expect, when the interview gets stuck, is "I don't know, but..." Even on questions that aren't coding questions, these are often good responses: "I don't know, but [this is how I would find out]" or "I don't know, but [this is a topic or problem that I believe is related]" .
I consider that a red flag. In this case, the interviewer is almost certainly less concerned with whether or not you can do the job than they are concerned with whether you think like them.
Though I do like your suggestion to try offering a terrible solution to get the conversation started. Usually it's breaking the ice that's difficult.
However, it's a bit unclear how this ties together with Dunning-Kruger effect (which is also used as an argument against democracy). The D-K effect would suggest that if you allow people to express doubt, the experts will doubt more, and overall performance will decrease.
It would be interesting if someone did a psychology experiment on that. (I am actually in favor of doing these kinds of demonstrations in high school, because it's in my opinion important for people to understand how democratic voting works, for example the fact that voting won't get you a simple average of the results - which is usually used as an argument against democracy.)
Democracy isn't about having an efficient system, it's about having a stable system. Democracy is an awful way of getting things done, it's just a reasonably good way of stopping very bad things from happening.
> Voting on everything prevents anything very stupid from happening, but also anything very brilliant.
You can guess who called the shots in his aircraft design teams. He did, because he was truly fucking brilliant.
Mandatory voting can include "I don't know" (and, in fact, it naturally falls out in a simple way from any use of preference ballots with a tallying system that accounts for ties and treats all unranked candidates as tied for the position immediately below all explicitly-ranked candidates.)
EDIT: Further, such a system would naturally handle the more common case where people do have known preferences, but they aren't accurately represented either as a forced preference ranking of all candidates (as with preference ballots that reject ties), or a unique most-preferred status for one candidate (as is the case with the "bullet" ballots typically used in FPTP elections.)
I'm always as truthful as possible in a job interview - especially technical ones. My background is not in tech, however I'm an autodidact with programming and whenever technical questions are asked that I may not know, I'll say it. And then I'll say how I think it should/would be done, or the steps I'd take to figure out the answer and solve the problem. Not sugarcoating some of my technical inability has faired me well so far. And then after I hear the question, think about the steps to do it, and/or get coached by the interviewee - I know the answer, and am ready to use it in my technical/creative arsenal. I feel like it's a win-win to not bullshit about something I don't know.
If you only get "I don't know" with no attempt at a guess or explanation for why they don't know then you may have issues.
I usually give a little preamble telling them to feel comfortable blurting out nonsense. I'd rather have them blurt out nonsense than sit there for 30 seconds in silence because they're afraid to say something stupid.
You can see the interviewee relax almost immediately.
There's a lot of value in that approach. I don't use it myself when interviewing people, but I do try to accomplish the same end.
He wouldn't really need to. By asking questions about very domain-specific knowledge, he could still achieve the same effect with anyone who didn't have a freakishly similar set of expertise.
Everybody wins when people leave their egos behind.
That usually gives me a better grasp of how he will solve a real world problem than the trivia questions.
But when hiring for teams that need to get specific work done fast, i do not underestimate the value of the trivia questions as it will show me the ramp up time to get that work done. Of course i apply that on top of the other means to get an idea if the candidate is a good fit overall.
There is no silver bullet for hiring.
I normally try and turn that scenario into a quick discussion where I hopefully let the interviewer display their vast knowledge and insight. Assuming the question is relevant I am always geniuenly interested in finding out about something I don't know. Seeing that I am not being paid to take the interview I feel it is only fair that I get something out of it.
Whereas to tell someone in advance "don't you dare to tell me I don't know" the person will just hold on to the thoughts until he or she has to spell that thought out (because he or she has to say something to get out of the misery).
It seems past performance would be more reliable. What have you created and what was your role in it? Can you articulate your passion for the problems we are solving? Can you show that your colleagues respected your work and benefited from collaborating with you?
