Comment by dmazzoni
2 years ago
While I admire your ethics, I feel like a lot of technical job interviews are structured such that you're supposed to actively collaborate with the interviewer. The interviewer is allowed to give you hints or suggestions, and they're very interested in how well the candidate takes hints.
And sometimes the hint can be a trick! I recently did an interview where the interviewer asked if I should use a shortcut to compare two strings, one that assumed there's only one way to normalize a string. I almost fell for it, but then I hesitated and mentioned that I was concerned about some languages where that assumption wouldn't hold. They agreed and were happy that I chose the safer approach.
There's a difference between collaborate and get clubbed over the head with the answer.
This guy was doing the latter, and it was meant to be an interview to test raw debugging/diagnostic skills. If I just followed the breadcrumbs, I'd show no real skill.
In a coding interview, I'd follow the hints.
Also many interviews are structured so there simply won't be time to finish the exercise if you're going slow.
In coding interviews, that's very true.
In this interview I wasn't concerned about that. If you are looking to see if someone understands Linux by testing diagnostic skill, if they are coming up with 3-4 different failures to check for every step... They are doing their job.
Higher diagnostic skill would be checking the highest-likelihood scenario (that the interviewer had created) first.
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