In life, it’s easy to say learn from mistakes, but it’s more powerful to learn from success. And successful people tend to learn from success because it’s so much harder to find.
Unfortunately for people like me, Google’s success has promulgated this mythology of the brain teaser question. Unfortunately for me, in spite of my professional success I find brain teasers difficult to answer under the pressure circumstances of an interview. I need time and space to think. And my approach to thinking is methodical and deliberate. This doesn’t mean I can’t handle high pressure circumstances… Working at Zynga is one pressure packed cooker after another, it just means I don’t do brain teasers.
So it was delightful to read this…
What I really loved was this paragraph:
Forget brain-teasers. Focus on behavioral questions in interviews, rather than hypotheticals. Bock said it’s better to use questions like, “Give me an example of a time when you solved an analytically difficult problem.” He added: “The interesting thing about the behavioral interview is that when you ask somebody to speak to their own experience, and you drill into that, you get two kinds of information. One is you get to see how they actually interacted in a real-world situation, and the valuable ‘meta’ information you get about the candidate is a sense of what they consider to be difficult.”
What I learned in 1998 was that the best predictor of future success is past success. So if you want to understand whether someone is good at solving hard problems, ask them about hard problems they solved in the past and drill into that.
In a earlier blog post, and on quora I have given my dismissive opinion of the brain teaser.
I hope that the valley will now switch from asking questions that are brain teasers to questions that are meaningful and powerful.
It will take time for this approach to talent evaluation to change, but I know it will.