I have the same idea in interviews. they need to be able to admit when they don't know or need help depending on the level. However I thought about it and I think the continuous "why" comes off as sort of childish or low effort. I didn't want to drive off people that reasonably didn't want to work in a place with a toxic culture. My solution was to ask a question that was specific to the workplace but technical so that it would require more information to solve. I looked for answers along the lines of:
- I don't know
- I don't have enough information based on the question
- I would do it this way generally but this question requires employer specific information.
Not someone that just barreled forward and came up with a defacto answer as the solution. They had to give some sort of admission that they could not really solve the problem as is.
I usually had some overlapping technical expertise with the candidates I was interviewing, so my approach was to prepare a line of questions relating to some obscure or esoteric technical issue I’d dealt with in the past. Usually I’d get to an I don’t know pretty organically.
One time I had a candidate who didn’t not know about a single massively obscure thing I’d asked him. He was a DBA for a Chinese ISP that had more subscribers than we had total population in the markets we were operating in. That guy was probably the best hire I ever made. He was always in an incredibly genuine good mood, he was always happy to help everybody, and he’d help people learn how to solve problems rather than just doing the solving for them. Everybody on the team got smarter and more competent working with him, and he was so good at his job that he never even got behind on his own work due to helping other people all the time. I hope he’s still doing well now, before I left that company I managed to make sure he was being paid bucketloads of money (which wasn’t something he ever seemed to be seeking out independently, he was always just happy to come to work and do his job).
- I don't know - I don't have enough information based on the question - I would do it this way generally but this question requires employer specific information.
Not someone that just barreled forward and came up with a defacto answer as the solution. They had to give some sort of admission that they could not really solve the problem as is.