An interview question you had better know how to answer | Hacker News Reader

An interview question you had better know how to answer

hypecycles.wordpress.com

34 pointsamrith30 comments

I disagree with everyone who commented on HN and on the guy's site.

The point of asking someone about their past failure is not to put them on the spot and test their oratorical skills. It's not to see how they overcame failures and ended up successful. There are easier ways to find these things out. Ask for an essay or ask directly about how they fixed a bad situation.

When asked about your past failures, the aim is to find out if you actually grasped why you were a failure. You can fail and recover many times in your life without ever figuring out why you were failed by someone and what the hell happened. Too often a failure is seen as passing a checklist (Sell X units, ship by X date, Fix X bugs). It doesn't matter if you failed or succeeded before. If you've made it to the interview then none of that counts anymore.

Failure is about self-reflection. Let me say that again. Successful failure is about self-reflection. It takes a great amount of maturity to grasp failure and come out ahead (and this doesn't mean getting a pass from someone). Failure is about initiative to learn and look back at the story.

I'll say it another way. There are 2 ways you can learn. First is formal. Someone teaches you or you teach yourself. You apply the material and get a pass or fail. That is how school is done. It's how most things are learnt and taught. Everyone knows how to do this.

The second way of learning is what they call learning from your mistakes. Make no mistake about it - It's not easy and there is a specific way to do it. Most people can explain what the failure was and how to fix it. It takes effort and plenty of time and contemplation to analyse the experience. That's the first step. The second step is to take that new understanding and grow as a person because of it. Again, there is a method to this. You practice it and look at the results.

Studying your failures is usually left to the subconscious by most people. If you can do it or even if you know that you need to and seek outside help to self-reflect then you are a mile ahead of most people when it comes to self-management.

You are asked about failure to find out how much self development you do. People that work hard on themselves like no other and who also want to work at your company are likely very good and you should hire them.

I think this is a bogus question. In fact, any of these expected questions can be well prepared for. If someone asked me this in an interview which I wanted to 'game' for some reason, I would spin a yarn about how I failed, learnt from my mistakes and am now a well-rounded, stronger human being.

But in the real world, failure doesn't work like that. You fail at times for no obvious reason. You fail sometimes and you have no idea what lessons you are supposed to learn. You fail at times and you know you can't fix that part of your personality.

The only interesting variant on this question I can think of (that I have used is) - disaster stories in technology. Everyone has one (if they don't, you should be suspicious) and you can find out a lot by the way they describe it.

The things people say indicate that they know what is expected of them.

"Do you think it's important to comment your code?" Someone who answers yes to that even when in practice they tend downgrade the value of it is involved in an important exchange. They are showing the interviewer that they respect their priorities. And if they are hired, they have set an expectation.

These discussions set an agenda. It's weaker that than the contracts you'll sign, but far stronger than nothing at all. And it is a useful filter for excluding people with a different worldview who are not going to work in the team.

I've disqualified myself in a couple of interview cycles for not playing the game on gang of four patterns. Yes, I could sit down and memorise them and pretend it was important, no I'm going to because that sets an agenda that is too far away from the way I work. Everyone has won through those hires not going ahead.

> Failure is about self-reflection.

> Failure is about initiative to learn and look back at the story.

Two gems. Thank you - I'm going to have to borrow these next time I discuss failure. About the second - do you have any tips on making your perception more learning based?

Learning is about the future. You want to take knowledge you have gained and use it to make the future more like what you want the future to be.

So then, when you perceive something, ask yourself, "How will additional events like this one affect my future?" Imagine scenarios where the event might occur again and play them out in your mind. Imagine yourself reacting the same way or a different way. Like playing chess.

I agree with you. I think it is a fine question. Why are people so defensive about it? One of the arguments is that people can prepare for it. Okay, prepare for it. You can tell if someone has prepared for the question or not by how much they think when they answer it. If they've prepared for it, the answer better be a good one.

Furthermore, if someone gets defensive when the question is asked, then that tells you something about that person. It tells you how they operate in tough situations. It tells you if they are honest. Honesty matters a lot in a stressful situation, because if you are trying to fix something and someone who messed up isn't saying they messed up then it is going to be a lot harder to fix it. Once you've discovered the error someone made and the truth comes out, now you're stuck with someone who messed up and lied to cover it up. An "oh... yeah, I might have flipped that switch..." will go a long way toward making everything right.

I don't have much experience interviewing people, I only hired in total about 40 or so, and interviewed maybe twice that. One thing I've never done though is to go into an interview with a prepared list of questions.

First I would try to get a feeling for the personality of the person applying for he job, to see if they would fit in, then I'd try to gage whether or not they had the required background for the job, and I might follow up with a question or two about that background.

A few people were caught fibbing and the interview was gracefully terminated. But for the most part, the people that showed up were honest and fairly candid about what they could and could not do. I've never felt the need to resort to 'trick' or 'puzzle' questions or questions that were meant to trip them up.

Psychological games with people that are already nervous tend to have weird outcomes, better to get them to be relaxed and to tell you what you need to know freely.

One guy even admitted to having stolen some office supplies from a previous employer (he had a hole in his resume).

The employer fired him on the spot but he was very capable, he'd learned his lesson and I ended up hiring him, he was quite amazed at being hired and was one of the best people we ever had working for us. And honest to a fault, certainly learned his lesson.

A couple of months ago one of my not-so-successful hires sent me a long letter of apology about some stupid stuff he'd pulled many years ago. I'd long since forgiven and forgotten, but it's quite amazing how decent most people are deep down. As an employer your main role is to bring that out in people. If you start by casting the relationship in terms of trick questions and such I think you're off on the wrong foot.

But then again, that seems to be the norm, so maybe I'm the one that's in the wrong. I haven't had people working for me for the last 4 years, and I don't think I ever will again, but still I wouldn't change much in the way of conducting interviews.

Probably the size of the organization doing the interviewing is a major factor in the process. If you have 50 applicants for a job or 3 that would make a huge difference in the approach.

I wish I could agree more with more upvotes. One of the most important factors IMHO when hiring people is their personality and ability to work with the team. A battery of quiz, psych and trivia questions does little to reveal anything related to that other than what a person's stress tolerances are.

I usually just interview as a conversation. Likely I'm going to have to be able to talk to this person regularly anyways. Once that happens, they relax and I've found that their background claims tend to be far more realistic, more willing to point out their faults, and yet still have plenty of ability to discuss deep technical questions as well. But now it's not 20 questions it's "can you whiteboard the architecture of that project your were mentioning a few minutes ago?" And then use that as a point of discussion, e.g. "well why did you do it this way vs. this way?" They should be able to provide a reasonable answer.

Really what most employers want is somebody who's able to think deeply, justify their own thought process, demonstrate the ability to research and general technical acumen. Most likely their technical history won't be a 1:1 match for what your company does anyway, so they'll simply have to learn a number of new languages or development metaphors, use cases, architectures etc.

In my experience, this is a crappy question because interviewees tend to prep for it. It's way better to ask people about the history of a project they worked on, what challenges they faced, how they overcame it, etc. Stories of failures usually arise from that.

Well, they should anyway. Some people try to dance around their failures, but those are no-hires. Confident candidates don't even think to not talk about their failures because it's all part of what made them successful.

I wish I could upvote you more than once because that is so true.(I know I COULD if I created a few throwaway accounts but that kind of hacking the system is not for me.) The unfortunate reality of HR is that a lot of them are looking for a polished answer to this question even though what they should be looking for is what you said.

You'd be surprised. The last few candidates I interviewed claimed never to have failed at anything. They also never had a time when they felt unmotivated at work, and had never argued with their manager or cow-orkers, and never made a mistake that affected a production system.

The real value of the question is that it tells you if this is the sort of person who only says what they think you want to hear, not the truth.

I participated in the interview of a dev candidate who had the same answer. "I really can't think of anything I've failed at." This was so implausible that on the basis of that answer alone I voted "no hire"

Funnily enough, after rolling with start-ups for a couple of years, you have enough material to spend hours answering this question.

This is a bad, bad, question because it doesn't structure the response towards learning about the candidate's thought processes and pre-stages the context of their response as a value judgment.

At best, you'll get a narrative about a specific project context and the candidate's actions which resulted in "failure". At worst, you'll get a disingenuous canned response from someone trying to game the interview and frame the chosen scenario as "success".

A better phrasing would be:

"Please tell me about a project experience when a plan, scenario, or design didn't unfold as originally intended."

The candidate can frame their response as "success", "failure", "improvisation", etc. and this opens up avenues to explore their thought processes, strategy, and 'leadership style' when responding to novel scenarios. This is also an opportunity to weigh the candidate's level of disclosure and frank communications as to what sorts of value judgments they, themselves, apply to the chosen scenario and their qualitative reactions to it.

Echoing the statements that others have made, I think this is a crappy question. When I get asked it, I tend to ask straight back what the interviewer means by 'failure'. Usually they have their own slant on it, which means you can answer pitch your response correctly

If I failed at something - as in made a mistake, for which I then corrected, I don't consider it a failure - it's called learning. If I failed at something, and didn't learn from it, or at least didn't learn how to correct for the failure, then I probably didn't know I failed at it - and I certainly wouldn't be able to articulate anything about it.

> “Tell me about something that you failed at and what you learned from it”. [..] Folks, if you plan to go to an interview, please think about this in advance and have a good answer to this one.

If you are not getting honest answers, you might want to "tune" your question. If you really care about the answer, IMHO, the best way to ask this question is by discussing the topic of how _your firm_ has failed in the past and what _you_ have learned from it. If the candidate thinks that the description is an honest one, they might reply to your question with honesty.

Interviews can be hacked, since there is always an objective. Particularly the behavioral-based interviewing technique 'tell me about a time'. Really, if you don't know about the STAR interviewing method, you're putting yourself at a disadvantage. All HR professionals know about it; Please google it or ask a friend who works in HR. It helps your interview perfomance if you know what they're filtering for. A very common filter is leadership - have you demonstrated it. Followed closely by problem solving and creativity.

Yes, however aren't we all (at least those of us on this board) looking for the personality type that can specifically do just that?

One time I was walking out of the supermarket and ran into the glass sliding door. I'm not sure what I'd learned though.

You didn't learn to watch where you're going? I'd think that'd be a rather valuable lesson...

I ran into a glass door once, too. But not into the flat part, but into the slender side. I bled a lot. (And I learned something --- next time I ran into something it was a post box, and not a glass door.)

I'll give you a free tip: avoid running into things (unless they're attractive members of the opposite sex).

I gave up on running in things [0] frequently when I turned eight or so. That was a long time ago. I even mastered the art of reading books while walking.

[0] To be more precise, things that I do not want to run into.

I liked to read so much I would read on the way to school.

This worked well until one day a lamppost decided to jump out right in front of me (me, age 6, bleeding profusely, very pissed off at not being able to read with the blood spouting everywhere).

Since then I don't read while mobile. I can't wait for my car to drive itself, that way I'd have lots more time to read (I still love to read).

Apropos reading. I just finished Larry Nieven's Ringworld. I only noticed that it was written in 1970 halfway through the book.

If you're in to old sf try to find 'The Space Merchants' by Pohl and Kornbluth.

Thanks. I'm into P.K. Dick's stuff, too. I read everything I could find in the local library. But since I just moved, they may be more here.

I'll check out 'The Space Merchants'.

That was worth reading if only for this clever comment:

> Dave just got pwnt.

http://hypecycles.wordpress.com/2009/09/30/interview-questio...

I guess suggesting to read http://37signals.com/svn/posts/1555-learning-from-failure-is... would not count as a good answer :(

A stiff canned question deserves a stiff canned response.

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