I'll let you know when I no longer feel like the chaff!
It'd probably be similar to beefield's. Present a problem with a clear success condition and see how resourceful they are in solving it. A failure would be solving the wrong problem, making excuses (or "the problem is not solvable"), confidently talking in abstractions that don't concretely pertain to the problem, or failure to ask a question/say "I don't know".
I don't know that there's a technical question or problem I could ask to make a call on whether or not they know their stuff.
Echoing the statements that others have made, I think this is a crappy question. When I get asked it, I tend to ask straight back what the interviewer means by 'failure'. Usually they have their own slant on it, which means you can answer pitch your response correctly
If I failed at something - as in made a mistake, for which I then corrected, I don't consider it a failure - it's called learning. If I failed at something, and didn't learn from it, or at least didn't learn how to correct for the failure, then I probably didn't know I failed at it - and I certainly wouldn't be able to articulate anything about it.
I'm still not sure how I feel about taking advice from people who have failed a lot. All other things being equal, I'd rather take advice from people who have always been successful.
I think maybe they can be distinguished by whether they bang their head against a wall until reality finally cracks their thick skull or they attack hard problems until their learning curve catches up. It's hard to tell the difference, but intuitively I feel like it is there to be found.
For what it's worth, the people who make me think they fall into the former camp seem to converge on Scrum as they start to react to their string of failures. I don't have any data on that.
Sometimes people go into a situation confused, fail, and don't know how to interpret why they failed or what parts caused the failure. I think it is worth distinguishing that type of failure from the type you're talking about. Why? Often when you tell someone you don't know how to do something or you think you'll fail at something, they have your type of failure in mind and they encourage you to just try again.
A bit too generalized for my taste. If you're solving a problem of passing a well-defined benchmark (or closer to home, iterating on a kitten meme-sharing app), then yes, fail away. If you are solving a problem of putting a man on the moon in the 60s, then you get to coordinate hundreds of thousands of people from education to fundamental science to industry to alloys to god knows how many other things for years. And only then you can launch and really find out if you succeeded or failed - both outcomes have precedents.
Depends on the definition. By design I fail a few times before I succeed whenever I'm debugging something, go for the low hanging fruit first.
The task as a whole though is usually successful given enough time. I've not been completely stumped yet (web dev/sysadmin is pretty trivial work, kinda bored of it honestly but the bills need paying) and can usually figure out a workaround in the worst case.
It weirdly helps that there's nobody for me to ask lmao. I'm the one others ask when they're stuck, when I get stuck I just gotta look into it more until something gives. "I'll figure it out" comes up a bunch.
I can't claim 100% success as I don't get to control everything I spend my work time on but of the things I have the time/resources it's not too far off.
I disagree with everyone who commented on HN and on the guy's site.
The point of asking someone about their past failure is not to put them on the spot and test their oratorical skills. It's not to see how they overcame failures and ended up successful. There are easier ways to find these things out. Ask for an essay or ask directly about how they fixed a bad situation.
When asked about your past failures, the aim is to find out if you actually grasped why you were a failure. You can fail and recover many times in your life without ever figuring out why you were failed by someone and what the hell happened. Too often a failure is seen as passing a checklist (Sell X units, ship by X date, Fix X bugs). It doesn't matter if you failed or succeeded before. If you've made it to the interview then none of that counts anymore.
Failure is about self-reflection. Let me say that again. Successful failure is about self-reflection. It takes a great amount of maturity to grasp failure and come out ahead (and this doesn't mean getting a pass from someone). Failure is about initiative to learn and look back at the story.
I'll say it another way. There are 2 ways you can learn. First is formal. Someone teaches you or you teach yourself. You apply the material and get a pass or fail. That is how school is done. It's how most things are learnt and taught. Everyone knows how to do this.
The second way of learning is what they call learning from your mistakes. Make no mistake about it - It's not easy and there is a specific way to do it. Most people can explain what the failure was and how to fix it. It takes effort and plenty of time and contemplation to analyse the experience. That's the first step. The second step is to take that new understanding and grow as a person because of it. Again, there is a method to this. You practice it and look at the results.
Studying your failures is usually left to the subconscious by most people. If you can do it or even if you know that you need to and seek outside help to self-reflect then you are a mile ahead of most people when it comes to self-management.
You are asked about failure to find out how much self development you do. People that work hard on themselves like no other and who also want to work at your company are likely very good and you should hire them.
Do you have any visual example? Or textual? I'd very much like to see exactly what you mean and what would you consider a failure at that interview (and what would you consider a success).
It'd probably be similar to beefield's. Present a problem with a clear success condition and see how resourceful they are in solving it. A failure would be solving the wrong problem, making excuses (or "the problem is not solvable"), confidently talking in abstractions that don't concretely pertain to the problem, or failure to ask a question/say "I don't know".
I don't know that there's a technical question or problem I could ask to make a call on whether or not they know their stuff.
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