Handling Knowledge Gaps Questions
Evaluates how a candidate acknowledges and responds to technical unknowns. Candidates should demonstrate honesty about limits, show methods for finding answers such as reading documentation, searching authoritative sources, asking engineering or subject matter experts, running experiments, and iterating on hypotheses. Provide concrete examples of encountering an unfamiliar technical challenge, the steps taken to resolve it, collaboration and communication used, and how the solution or learning was validated and documented for future use.
HardTechnical
0 practiced
You're reviewing a pull request where the author left the comment 'I couldn't find a way to do X' and proceeded with a suboptimal pattern. How do you conduct the review to teach the author, preserve team velocity, and ensure correctness? Describe the tone, concrete suggestions, follow-up pairing or docs, and how you'd prevent the issue in future reviews.
EasyTechnical
0 practiced
How do you decide between spending a day researching an unfamiliar technical solution versus shipping a pragmatic workaround during a two-week sprint? Describe the criteria you use (user impact, technical risk, reversibility) and provide an example decision you'd make under pressure.
HardTechnical
0 practiced
Define a set of quantitative and qualitative metrics and a dashboard to measure a team's improvement in closing knowledge gaps over a quarter. Include leading indicators (e.g., knowledge-ticket age), lagging indicators (e.g., incidents caused by assumptions), survey metrics, and how you'd tie these metrics to team goals or performance reviews.
EasyTechnical
0 practiced
When you must become productive quickly in a new programming language (e.g., Go), what's your prioritized checklist for the first week (toolchain, syntax, testing framework, package management, common idioms), and what concrete goals would you set for the first 7 days?
HardTechnical
0 practiced
Describe a high-stakes decision you made under significant technical unknowns (for example, choosing a storage solution for a privacy-sensitive product). Walk through the information you gathered, stakeholders consulted (legal, product, infra), trade-offs considered, and how you mitigated residual risks after the decision.
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