Can I challenge the interviewer to give me a proper technical feedback?

Question

Recently, I was in a technical interview, and after that, the interviewers gave me a technical task. During the interview, I got the impression the interviewers lacked proper knowledge of the technical task and I really do not want to work in a company with a poor team lead.

I am done with the task now, and wish to ask the interviewer to give me a technical review of my tasks. I want to find out if the interviewer is able to do the task himself.

I am wondering, if it is a weird thing to challenge the interviewer?

Answer 1

Team Leads don't have to be able to do everything that their team does. My Team Lead, for example, doesn't code C# - that doesn't mean that he's poorly skilled in the least or incapable of being a really good Team Lead (which he is).

He's asking you to do a task - whether you feel that he could do the same task or not (or up to your standard) is entirely irrelevant to the interview process, as long as he or someone else can validate that you've completed it to a satisfactory level.

Answer 2

What is your purpose here? To score points? Prove you are cleverer than the interviewer?

Who says he's the person evaluating your performance on the task? There's a good chance he will have someone more knowledgeable looking at your work.

All "challenging" them will do is show them you're someone who likes to win. You won't have to decide if you want to work for them, because they probably won't offer you the position.

Answer 3

You don't need to "challenge" the interviewer. Simply ask if they could give you feedback on how well you did on your interview, and an in depth overview on your technical question. It isn't rude as long as they don't find out your intentions, which seem to be that you're trying to find out if the person interviewing you has the same technical skills to determine if you want to work there.

Although I do believe if you already have those red flags telling you that you don't want to work there, it's best to refrain from taking the job.

Answer 4

Something people sometimes forget: interview questions aren't there because they ascertain your technical skill. They're there because the interviewer believes they can use the range of outputs to figure out whether the applicant would be a good hire. Yes, they often are attempts to measure technical skill, but that's indirect: the interviewer believes that if you give A/B/C as an answer, you're not technically proficient, but if you give D/E/F as an answer, you are.

With that in mind, it's pretty clear: they know how to evaluate your output. If they didn't, they wouldn't be asking that as a question.

Let me give an example. We're doing interviews, and one of our questions is: "Write some C# code that does X with a file." Nothing complicated... except there are multiple ways of doing it, each with pros/cons. Sure, we'd like to see some code... but what we're really after is 'Does this person think through problems/issues before they start trying to crank out code? Do they try to get additional info if the code requires it? Did they weigh code simplicity vs performance?'

In our question? I have to admit, while I could freehand write code that would do a read-it-all-into-memory approach with a few lines of code, I don't know off the top of my head how to manually work with a filestream object - I'd have to google it. But that isn't what matters - what matters is, I know how to evaluate the range of outputs a candidate might give for that answer.

Make sense? It doesn't matter whether your interviewer can actually answer the question, because that's not why they chose the question. It matters whether they can use your answer to figure out whether you'd be good at the job. (Or phrasing it another way: if their goal was to always be smarter than the interviewee, they could just ask questions they all knew the answer to already. But that's not what the goal is.)

Answer 5

It sounds like you have certain minimum standards you expect of the people you're going to be working with if you're going to accept the job.

This is perfectly fine and normal, indeed it's a good thing. The very point of an interview process is not just to verify that you match their requirements, but also to verify they match yours.

That being said, how you go about assessing the latter is critical. There's an accepted dynamic in most interview processes that you're the one under assessment, and deviating from this too much will be perceived as weird and put your application at risk. You therefore have to be careful about how you approach it.

The best opportunity for you to assess them is during the face-to-face interview, which is already usually conversational in nature and during which most of the time there is a section where you are explicitly invited to ask questions.

Unfortunately, that opportunity has gone and you've only managed to leave with an impression of what you wanted to know. Putting it plainly, yes it absolutely will be weird (and insulting) to now start challenging the interviewers with the very take-home task they they've asked you to complete, and doing this will very likely cost you the job offer.

Some possible good news though: I've never heard of an interview process where a take-home task was the final stage. It's likely you'll get another opportunity later to have further conversations with your future colleagues and make this assessment in a better way.

If I were you, unless you absolutely trust your gut, I would just ignore your first impressions and continue with the process in the hope that this happens. Also learn from this, and spend some time thinking about how next time you're going to properly assess the requirements you have in an interview process right from the start.