Ryan Peterman, who became a top engineer at Instagram, initially failed his Facebook interview. The interviewer ended it early, stating he wasn't good enough. This demonstrates that a single, high-stakes interview performance is a poor predictor of long-term career success and resilience.
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Ineffective interviews try to catch candidates failing. A better approach models a collaborative rally: see how they handle challenging questions and if they can return the ball effectively. The goal is to simulate real-world problem-solving, not just grill them under pressure.
Beyond IQ and EQ, interview for 'Resilience Quotient' (RQ)—the ability to persevere through setbacks. A key tactic is to ask candidates about their proudest achievement, then follow up with, 'What would you do differently?' to see how they navigated strife and learned from it.
Despite building "Flex," a popular open-source iOS debugging tool later used internally at Facebook, Ryan Peterman's interviewers at Instagram showed no interest in it. They focused solely on algorithm questions, highlighting a disconnect between real-world impact and standardized hiring processes at large companies.
Strong engineering teams are built by interviews that test a candidate's ability to reason about trade-offs and assimilate new information quickly. Interviews focused on recalling past experiences or mindsets that can be passed with enough practice do not effectively filter for high mental acuity and problem-solving skills.
