Tech Interview Practices

Yes, because getting to the right answer is not the point of the interview. Apart from anything else, getting to the right answer may mean you memorised it and are incapable of doing anything else. Always show your working and thought process. Asking questions and showing that you understand tradeoffs and that users have different requirements is a good way to do that.

It's an interview, not a competition. The interviewer would've been much better of asking: "Why?"

I have interviewed many people. I have never once been impressed by someone figuring out a convoluted way to force a round peg into a square hole. The people I recommend are the ones who question why I would want to do something. If need be, I can always follow up with "but what if you had to do it this way." But for a question meant to evaluate technical ability, I am going to ask you how to do something which is a best practice. If I'm asking you how you would solve an absurd pr

Interviewers are (should) not interested in the correct answer. They are interested in seeing the candidate think out loud. They want to see how you start tackling difficult problems.

You don't deserve the downvotes because that seems to be the exact thought process here: an interview is not about what the candidate can do, but how [s]he responds to weird gotchas.

As far as I've read, sometimes questions are ambiguous to see how the interviewee proceeds with the problem, if they ask relevant questions.

If you don't know how to pivot an interview question when the interviewee is already familiar with it, you aren't qualified to perform interviews.If the goal is to find how they approach problem solving, you can adapt by asking about increasingly difficult aspects of the problem. If that isn't the goal, your hiring practices are wrong.

As an interviewer, you're not looking for a solution; it's supposed to be an ice-breaker, to get a technical conversation going.Doesn't always work, but good enough.(OTOH, if the interviewer has no idea why they're asking this, and they're just blindly checking off boxes from "The Greatest Checkbox List For Interviewers (tm)", it will fail like any other tool wielded by a clueless user. A very specific failure mode here is "THE BOOK has The On

Asking relevant questions at an interview is a good idea, but I've noticed that a lot of technical interviewers ask questions it took them weeks to understand and fix when they use this approach. Understanding a problem is often more difficult than solving it ... knowing that the interviewer understands the problem and constraints is even more of a challenge.I once had an interviewer give me the kobayashi maru without telling me. I thought the guy was a jerk. He could just have pulled a gu

That's a trick question. Trick questions are bad because they test interviewing skill and not programming skill.It's a trick question because you want the interviewee to answer something different (I don't know) than what you're asking them to answer. Confident applicants might feel up to saying they don't know, but nervous people who are very self conscious in an interview setting may respond completely differently than they would if they were asked the same question