Revisiting the Art of the Graceful Exit

Learning Goals

• Revisit strategies for a graceful exit
• Strengthen your ability to respond to questions you don’t know the answer to

Warm Up

Think back to a time in an interview setting when were asked a question you didn’t know the answer to.

• How do you feel?
• Regardless of how you answered in that moment, how do you wish you’d responded to the question?

Purpose of an Interview

We’ve talked about the purpose of an interview quite a few times at this point, but it’s important to keep revisiting this topic because it’s easy to get sucked into the idea that an interviewer is only interviewing for technical competency.

Graceful Exit Strategies

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?

Students Demonstrate Graceless Interview Answers

You’re going to practice graceful exits in a few minutes, but first, let’s practice graceless exits! This way you will have a chance to see what it feels like as an interviewer to receive a graceless answer.

Here’s how this works, your instructor will start by drawing a random student for the first interviewee. Then they will ask a technical interview question and the first student will give a graceless response. Then that first student becomes the interviewer. The instructor will draw a second random student. The first student will ask a technical interview question and the second student will give a graceless response.

This will continue until everyone has a chance to ask and answer ending with the last student drawn asking a question of their instructor.

When gracelessly answering, your answers might be a short response like “I don’t know”, pivoting without permission, making something up, or something else! Feel free to be creative!

Feel free to use any short technical question or select from the following:

• 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?

As you are listening to graceless responses, reflect on these questions:

1. How does is feel from the interviewer’s perspective to receive a graceless response?
2. What does this answer tell you about the interviewee? What qualities does it convey?

Breakout Room Practice

Today we’re going to do our breakout room practice in groups of 3 or 4.

Each person will rotate between being the interviewer, the interviewee, and the observer (for groups of 4 there will be 2 observers).

As the interviewee, answer to the best of your abilities - these questions are especially hard so you will have the opportunity to practice a graceful exit!

After the interviewee answers, the interviewer can give kind and actionable feedback, again referring to the questions above about what additional information the answer tells you about the candidate. The observer is not responsible for asking questions, answering questions, or giving feedback. They can focus on learning from observing how someone else tackles hard questions.

Questions

Reflection

In a notebook, write down your reflection on the following question:

What are your biggest takeaways from this lesson?