Yeah I was more pointing out that the things touched upon in an interview environment for inexperienced and experienced engineers can be wildly different. For inexperienced engineers, the interview can be spent talking about "new" technology, "new" ideas, and so on with excitement (despite the fact these things might altogether not be new or may be flawed.) For experienced engineers, at least in my experience, interviews tend to be more sobering and focused on blowing holes in ideas and talking about how they were bit by such-and-such an issue.
It's a hard balance. In the long haul, you often want people who are careful and diligent and have experience that tempers their urge to jump into things too quickly. But, this type of attitude can actually hurt in startups. In an interview where the particular 3 or 4 things you touch upon are extrapolated (correctly or not) to be the main self-identifying traits of how you work and how you think about problems, if you tell even just one story about superior databases from the 70's or seem to be overly-pedantic when it comes to blowing holes in ideas this can be a 'red flag.'
In a startup environment, I'd rather have the engineer who I think will fall in a hole 3 times and figure out a solution eventually than another who I think will think too hard and fall in one in 3x the time due to their fear built up from previous failures. In an interview, if I am spending my time with the person mostly talking about things that have gone wrong and how everything new is old, I will worry they will be too paralyzed to just hack on and break things -- and this type of focus, while obviously invaluable in many situations, tends to come from more experienced engineers since they have seen more shit go wrong.
It's a hard balance. In the long haul, you often want people who are careful and diligent and have experience that tempers their urge to jump into things too quickly. But, this type of attitude can actually hurt in startups. In an interview where the particular 3 or 4 things you touch upon are extrapolated (correctly or not) to be the main self-identifying traits of how you work and how you think about problems, if you tell even just one story about superior databases from the 70's or seem to be overly-pedantic when it comes to blowing holes in ideas this can be a 'red flag.'
In a startup environment, I'd rather have the engineer who I think will fall in a hole 3 times and figure out a solution eventually than another who I think will think too hard and fall in one in 3x the time due to their fear built up from previous failures. In an interview, if I am spending my time with the person mostly talking about things that have gone wrong and how everything new is old, I will worry they will be too paralyzed to just hack on and break things -- and this type of focus, while obviously invaluable in many situations, tends to come from more experienced engineers since they have seen more shit go wrong.