I hear ya. I would definitely not disqualify someone for not knowing the answer.
In fact, someone who is able to sort of work through the problem on the spot may even be preferable to someone who just knows the answer because they happened to read Wikipedia the week before.
Seems like there's a silver lining here. It reinforces the idea that the answer to the problem is not necessarily the important part. When you can trivially provide a correct answer, it places more emphasis on the skill of being able to actually explain and work through the logic as a way to distinguish yourself from other candidates.
Yeah, bottom line, if you don't know an answer, then "I don't know" is always the right answer and the (ironically) most impressive answer. Plus you can always do things to mitigate, like talk about related or adjacent concepts a bit, state how you're willing to learn, maybe even take a guess at it. But if you bullshit you're either going to get caught, or, almost worse, get the job and feel like a fraud for months.
Always be hired or not hired for who you actually are!
Sure, but if I ask you an interview question and your answer is good enough that I want to use it: you'll probably be the one implementing the solution.
Why would I trust the answer more than the person?
This reasoning is flawed. You'll have no way of knowing if your candidate's answer is actually correct (they may come up with a working solution that's different than your ore-canned answer), or whether they have a flaw.
The whole point of hard problems is to see how people approach problems - and having them identify their own mistakes and correct for them is part of that.
An important corollary is that school and tests teach you not to be wrong. They teach you that incorrect answers will be punished.
Yet, most interesting questions in life don’t yet have defined answers. Thus you need to have and test a hypothesis, which will very often be “incorrect” the first time around. But that doesn’t actually matter - the mere act of thinking about and defining what an answer could be sets you up to iterate and test. Eventually, you may find product market fit (a - not the - right answer).
You have to be willing to be wrong at first to learn...and win.
If there are consistently used questions and specific criteria for assessing responses, can a candidate just learn the likely questions and what constitutes the "right" answer?
Your point is good, but in making it, you sound like an adversarial interviewer.
You and OP are actually agreeing with "the correct answer is it depends and now let's discuss context". This echoes my experience as interviewer too. It's a red flag when the candidate responds with "the correct answer". That's what OP is calling out.
I'm replying here because I get the impression you're looking for "the right answer" as you see it: "the first step is to mitigate then do root cause". You're right! But it also could be too adversarial.
Not only that, but if it's a topic you don't know much about and you aren't seeing information from a variety of different sources, how would you even be able to know it's a wrong answer?
Then you risk rejecting exceptional candidates who didn't come up with the answer that you learned.
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