When a hiring manager asks an unanswerable question, what if that's the whole point?

In this one, Corissa brings along a Reddit thread that stopped her in her tracks. A candidate who discovered, mid-interview, that the interviewer had never once rejected someone based on their actual answer. What they were watching for was whether you'd sit with the discomfort of having no right option, or immediately reach for a safe response ... one where you try to please the interviewer.

That question spirals us into the Kobayashi Maru, the art of giving feedback (and filtering feedback), why founders hold back from the conversations that would actually tell them the truth, and what it means to stop preparing the right answers and start trusting your own judgement.

• The Star Trek test designed to be unwinnable — and the eejit who won anyway
• Why the interviewer never rejects based on the answer itself
• The golden rule for making sense of feedback that's almost always true
• Why founders often make every move except the one that would actually test the idea
• Why when you hear "other people would ..." it should set off alarm bells
• The Red Queen effect in interviews: why every clever question eventually gets gameable
• How to prepare for interviews by stopping preparing for interviews

This one's for anyone who's noticed that the world keeps getting less predictable, and that "sitting with discomfort" is somehow both obvious advice and surprisingly hard to take.

References

• The Iron Triangle (good / cheap / fast ... pick two)
• Mike Haber's Inverted Iron Triangle (bad / late / over-budget ... you can have all three!)
• Neil Gaiman's feedback rule (attributed, then immediately un-attributed, could be apocryphal)
• Star Trek's Kobayashi Maru scenario
• The Red Queen Effect

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