Comment by temporallobe

The beginning of wisdom is to understand that nobody knows everything. I regularly interview candidates for my team and other teams. I can pretty much determine in about an hour if a candidate is a good fit or not. But one thing I have noticed lately is that some of them try to cheat (only possible with remote interviews of course). Basically they google answers as we are talking, or they have someone else do it in the background. It’s pretty obvious because there are long pauses, attempts to delay, indications that they’re reading something, and then they suddenly know the answers. They never say “I don’t know.” My “gotcha” technique is to ask a really esoteric question that I am certain the candidate would not know, and somehow, miracle of miracles, they suddenly know the answer after “thinking” about it for a minute. I actually don’t really care how much you know, rather, I care that you are honest, confident, resourceful, passionate, and that you communicate clearly. Obviously intelligence matters as well, and I’d take an intelligent person with the above-mentioned qualities who lacks knowledge in a particular technology than a “qualified” candidate who pretends to know everything and is a liar. And hey, I’ll be the first to admit that I live on stack overflow.