Incidentally, I interviewed a guy yesterday and we whiteboarded a real problem we had encountered last week.  He couldn&#x27;t solve the problem we presented and really didn&#x27;t even try to dig in much.  I was surprised how unwilling he was to dig in so I started asking him about his own environment and tried to get him to describe other problems he&#x27;s solved and how they might relate.  He couldn&#x27;t really do it even with that being so open ended.  At the end of the interview I came away with the impression he was just turning knobs at his other jobs and didn&#x27;t have much of a chance to think for himself.  In this case more enthusiasm would have gone a long way for him because if he could have shown me mastery over the things he did know I would have been willing to teach&#x2F;train him on the many things he didn&#x27;t know yet.