I’ve been a hiring manager for quite a long time now, and I’ve found one question is increadibly effective at seperating the best candidates out from the rest.
I’ll even let you know what it is ahead of time…
First, some background. This interview questions is used by Elon Musk, is backed by science, and is extremely revealing.
It’s hard, almost impossible, to fake a good answer. And if I’m at all suspicious I can just ask it again and all will be revealed.
What is that question?
“Tell me about some of the most difficult problems you worked on and how you solved them?”
Why is this answer revealing? Because the problems that juniors, seniors, and principal level engineers see as “difficult” are wildly different. And memorizing the answer doesn’t work, because I’ll expect you to describe in detail how you solved the problems. That means I’ll want to know what data you looked at, how you worked through the issues, got buy in from stakeholders, the tradeoffs you considered. It’s very hard to do that without being actively involved.
And after that, if I’m not sure… “OK, that sounds fantastic. Tell me about a few more…”
There’s no memorizing your way out of this.
