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I'm wondering how to answer that?

Ask the interviewer. One of the things that I find most difficult about interviewing is when the candidate doesn't ask me any questions during the technical parts of an interview. If you aren't sure, you need to ask me -- I am perfectly capable of misphrasing a question or assuming you have context that you don't. Asking your coworkers for help is a perfectly legitimate problem solving strategy.

Interviewing is stressful and hard; no need to make it more stressful and harder on yourself.



I sometimes ask questions and get 'What would you do if there was no one to ask?' and 'What would you do if there was no Google?' and I would like to understand this. Should I have everything rote memorized? Should everything I do be a bespoke solution?


The latter is a gentler way of saying, "no, I want your solution to this trivial problem".

The former is a question about your work process; for instance, if they say, "ok, so build Twitter" and you respond rationally with, "what of Twitter should I build?", they're probably looking for how you operate in an environment with underspecified work. It might be a good idea to talk about how you'd defend your decisions to draw the boundaries of the problem; why you chose to ignore e.g. streaming updates or following; &c.




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