Art of the Graceful Exit

Learning Goals

• Strategies for responding to questions you can’t answer.
• Identify personal qualities you want to highlight.

Warm Up

Imagine an interview where you are are asked a question you do not know the answer to.

• How do you feel?
• How do you answer?
• What impression does the interviewer have of you based on your answer?

Purpose of an Interview

What is the job of an interviewer?

Of course they are asking you some knowledge-based questions to see what you know and what you don’t know, but more importantly, they are trying to figure out what it would be like working with you.

What type of person are you? What are you like working with teams? How much direction, supervision, and assistance will you need?

When answering interview questions, you are providing the interviewer with lots of insight and information about the personal qualities you will bring to their team.

Demonstrating Personal Qualities

Take a minute to jot down the personal qualities you would like the interviewer to walk away knowing about you.

Examples:

• Curious
• Enthusiastic
• Humble
• Hard-working
• Growth mindset
• Good problem-solver

Keep these qualities in mind as you start to formulate you answers to questions you don’t know the answer to. Even if we can’t give them the correct technical answer, we can still leave them with more knowledge about who we are as a developer, a teammate, and a human.

Some Example Responses

Clarifying Questions

Interview question: “Can you give me some examples of how you might optimize an application?” Response: “By optimizing an application, do you mean making it faster?”

What qualities is the interviewee displaying when they ask questions like this?

Pivot

Response: “I’m not familiar with that concept, but it reminds me of __ . Could I talk a bit about that instead?”

What qualities is this interviewee displaying?

Instructors Demonstrate Graceful (and Graceless) Interview Answers

As the instructors demonstrate responses, reflect on these questions:

1. What does this answer tell you about the interviewee? What qualities does it convey?
2. What might it be like working with this person?
3. What could the interviewee do to improve their answer?
4. What skills could you demonstrate through your answer?

Breakout Rooms

Take turns being the interviewer and the interviewee.

As the interviewee, to the best of your abilities - remembering to practice a graceful exit if you don’t know the answer!

After the interviewee answers, the rest of the group can give kind and actionable feedback, again referring to the questions above about what additional information the answer tells you about the candidate.

Example Questions

• What is the difference between an Array and a List?
• In as much detail as possible, describe the Request/Response Cycle.
• What does MVC stand for?
• What are a few benefits of automated testing?
• What does it mean to compile code?
• What is HTTP?
• What are three built-in c# datatypes, with examples of each?
• What are the stages of a test?

Reflection

In a notebook, write down your reflections to these questions:

1. What are your biggest takeaways from this lesson?
2. What qualities about yourself are you wanting to convey in an interview and how can you accomplish this?
3. How will you gracefully exit an interview question where you do not know the answer?