So many of you 20-somethings interviewing really make me cringe! Basically, many of you are a stark mirror in which I can see how terrible I was as an interviewer in my 20&#x27;s and 30&#x27;s.<p>Be honest now, do you do this?<p><pre><code>    1) See something or think of something
    2) Decide that it&#x27;s the most important point
    3) Go on a &quot;fishing&quot; expedition to try and get the interviewee to see it
    4) If the interviewee can&#x27;t figure out what you&#x27;re hinting at, decide
       s&#x2F;he&#x27;s completely worthless! (Or if she gets it, decide she&#x27;s the ultimate!)
</code></pre>
A lot of you do this. Cut it out. It&#x27;s idiotic. It presupposes a pretty arrogant view of the relative value of your own perceptions. What you really need to be doing is <i>listening.</i><p>I had the experience of someone doing this to me with concurrency, then concluding I&#x27;m an impostor, <i>while I&#x27;m telling him about 3 concurrent systems I&#x27;ve worked on.</i> The disconnect? He was &quot;fishing&quot; for the current undergrad spiel about scheduling. Sorry, we covered it, but that wasn&#x27;t emphasized in the same way when I was an undergrad, and the poorly thought out puzzle you came up with on the spot wasn&#x27;t such a great hint.<p>Given the number of times I was mis-identified as an impostor programmer during interviews (a minority of instances, but still) there is clearly something going on. You guys are just like the young Ivy league grads in Mad Men. You just have different clothes and different language, but you are looking out for the signs of your own tribe just the same.