Don’t Say “I Don’t Know”: A Horrible Advice for a Tech Interview

Image by Michal Jarmoluk from Pixabay

I’ve interviewed hundreds of candidates for various software engineering positions, and one of the most annoying situations is when you ask a concrete technical question, and the candidate starts to ramble on unrelated topics instead of just admitting “I don’t know”.

Probably, this is due to a wide-spread advice that you might have heard before: “On a job interview, never admit that you don’t know the answer. Instead, try to guess or keep talking on some related topics”. This is a horrible advice, and here’s why.

If you don’t know the answer and simply start rambling on, this will be immediately obvious for the interviewers. They may get an impression you’re trying to cheat or beguile them. Such behavior might come off as disrespectful.

If you get a direct question, don’t try to avoid the answer or steer the conversation to another topic. Here’s how to properly behave in such situation:

• If you really don’t know the answer, then admit to yourself: you’re no longer in the “knowing” territory, you’re in the “guessing” or “demonstrating proxy knowledge” territory. Don’t try to persuade the interviewer that you “know”, just admit that you don’t.
• If you can come up with a similar topic (“proxy knowledge”), mention this to the interviewer…