Contrasting Interview Experience

Interviewer A

• Runs the round to maximize signal. Every question is set up to let the candidate show what they can do.
• Steers deliberately, with follow-ups in mind, so the discussion builds instead of drifting.
• Checks fundamentals early — e.g. nudging the candidate toward a custom data structure so the design can be extended cleanly later.
• Catches over-complexity early — stays attentive enough to flag it in the moment and ask the candidate if it can be simplified.
• Stays fully present and engaged with the candidate the whole time.

Interviewer B

• Brings a question the candidate had already been given in an earlier round, then has to swap it out — burning the candidate's time before the real problem even starts, with nothing added back at the end.
• Treats the round as background while attention sits elsewhere — the candidate can tell, and the signal drops.
• Gives the candidate no framing: no scope, no expected format, nothing to anchor the design to.
• Gives contradictory direction — asks the candidate to hardcode, then mid-way says it should have been dynamic.
• Treats a correct, considered answer as cheating rather than competence — the candidate works through the algorithm carefully before stating the complexity, and instead of reading it as signal, the round stalls into second-guessing and a demand to check the laptop's display settings (the screen was already shared). The round shifts from evaluating the candidate to disproving them.
• No follow-ups, no course-correction — the conversation never gets steered, so it goes nowhere.
• Lets time run unmanaged, so the round ends well short of what it could have covered.

If you interview people: your job isn't to watch the candidate fail on their own — it's to build the conditions where their real ability shows. Interviewer A does that. Interviewer B quietly costs aspiring candidates chances they earned.