alt Hacker NewsThis can work with the way you think as well.
Many years ago, I had a technical manager who never felt any pressure to be the first to come up with the answer to a question or the solution to some problem. If I was having a technical conversation with him, and we arrived at a particularly subtle or complex issue, he could go completely silent, just staring straight ahead with his fingers to his lips. I would find it very uncomfortable, and I would start blurting out half-baked ideas to fill the silence, but he would either raise his finger or (usually) just ignore me. This could go on for 30-60 seconds, at which point he might shrug and say "I don't know" or, more likely, have a pretty well formed idea of how to move ahead.
I used to joke to my co-workers that during those silent interludes, he was swapping in the solution from a remote disk.
This manager also typed with one or two fingers, and pretty slowly too. But he wrote a lot of good code.
Replies
> he might shrug and say "I don't know"
> I would start blurting out half-baked ideas to fill the silence
> This manager also typed with one or two fingers, and pretty slowly too. But he wrote a lot of good code.
I that once in a technical interview and got the job (just paused for 30 seconds until the answer came to me). I think they expected a 15 minute process of problem solving.
If I recall correctly the question was something like:
You are sitting recording cars by their license plate as they drive down a road. You only have N spots on your worksheet. You can overwrite spots as many times as you need to. By the end of the day you must have an unbiased sampling of cars that have driven by you. How do you record the cars?
I often do this in meetings and have gotten into the habit of saying "I'm thinking". It's not much but it gives both of us time to think and explicitly makes it clear I don't expect the person to say something. I think that helps.