It’s the beginning of 2024, layoffs happen on every corner, and I’m one of those who were affected. One thing I’ve been reminded of is that interviews are tricky for me. As controversial as it sounds, it gets even trickier when I am asked questions related to my area of interest. It’s easy if you don’t know anything about a subject - admit it, and that’s it. But when you’ve been working in the field for a few years and you know the question is related, but you can’t remember some of the details - that’s when it gets interesting.
Sometimes, I find it hard to come up with a good answer on the spot. During one of the recent interviews, I was asked some rather foundational questions for an experienced front-end developer. We covered CORS, basic networking, DNS, HTTP, algorithms complexity, data structures, etc. But I forgot some details because I don’t think about those topics in depth every day. Those are typically abstracted away. However, I know the context and can look up the details. But that’s what we do afterwards, not during the interview.
Maybe, that’s something to introduce in day-to-day work? Something like Technology Review sessions? But this is a topic for another day.
Sometimes I keep thinking about the questions and even talk about them to myself. Not every interview makes me reflect on my answers. But when it happens, it is a sign of a good interview. Most importantly, my recent one made me learn and discover the gaps in my knowledge. As I kept thinking about my answers, some details that I had missed bubbled up, and I came up with new arguments to support my ideas and realised where my understanding was lacking. It was a good interview, and I am grateful I had a chance to participate in it.
There must be that magical balance between letting a candidate know what topics to review and not giving any clues. On one hand, you don’t want to list the questions you will ask - that’s cheating. On the other hand, interviews are for testing the depth of a candidate’s knowledge. There must be an optimal way to prepare a candidate for a conversation without revealing the exact topics.
I certainly had my share of fun. So much so that I decided to reflect on it. I don’t know if there’s an algorithm to come up with a good answer on the spot or if that’s merely my quirk that I need time to analyse the question or a situation.