In a tech interview, saying I don't know beats bluffing

Travis Wentworth, a tech worker talking with fellow tech worker Tylor Wentworth about how to break into the field, was walking through what happens after a candidate mentions a home project. He used his own tinkering as the example. He had set up a cron job, a built in timer that runs commands automatically, on a Raspberry Pi, a cheap pocket size computer, to turn on his television.

In his telling, the interviewer pushes back. Why use a cron job, the interviewer asks, when a pile of scheduled jobs can grow unwieldy and eventually break the machine, and, in words Travis Wentworth used to imagine the question, "write it in C or as a JavaScript module or something else?"

That, Wentworth argues, is when most candidates misunderstand the moment. "It's not acceptable to be wrong. It's acceptable not to know, though," he said.

What he meant was this. It is not acceptable, in his view, to state something as fact, especially something tied to a certification, and be wrong about it. It is acceptable to say you do not know, or, in Travis Wentworth's words, "This is the first thing that came to mind." Tylor Wentworth put the same rule in his own terms, saying he will offer a guess only if he labels it, with something like, "I'm not sure how that works. My gut instinct tells me," and then explains his thinking.

Travis Wentworth believes a correction in that moment is encouraging, not fatal. If the interviewer explains the disadvantages of your approach, he said, that is a win because, as Travis Wentworth put it, "The person across from you is taking an interest in what you're doing."

Tylor Wentworth said he gets corrected a lot, and his response is, "Wow, that's really cool. Thanks for letting me know." He said it just adds to his knowledge base, and that curiosity is what interviewers want to see.