The interview I won by not writing code

I once sat a technical interview built around date handling. Watching how people approached it told you more than any solution ever could. Most candidates went straight for the machinery: DateTime objects, timezone math, parsing libraries. They got tangled in the implementation before they’d understood the problem they were being asked to solve.

I didn’t write any code for a while. I sat there and mapped out what the user actually needed first, in plain sentences. Once I had that written down, the whole thing quietly collapsed into simple integer arithmetic. No date library. No timezones. A few lines of code. The recruiter told me afterwards it was the highest score they’d ever given on that challenge, and I’m fairly sure it’s because I spent the first ten minutes not coding.

I keep coming back to that interview in the AI era. A model will happily hand you the library-heavy version, confident and elaborate, solving a harder problem than the one you actually have. It’s very good at answering the question you typed. It has no idea whether that was the right question.

So the skill that won me that interview matters more now than it did then. Work out what you’re actually building, in the smallest honest terms, before you let anything start building it, human or machine.