You Don't Need to Solve It: What Actually Gets You Hired in Tech

Here's a secret from someone who's been on every side of the hiring table — as a candidate who's passed 80%+ of technical processes (including Google and Meta), as a hiring manager who's interviewed hundreds of engineers, and as the former CTO of Codility, the platform that powers technical assessments at thousands of companies worldwide: the interview is not about solving the problem. Most candidates walk into coding interviews laser-focused on getting to the correct solution. They grind LeetCode, memorize algorithm patterns, and panic when they hit a wall. But here's what they miss — interviewers aren't scoring your answer. They're evaluating how you think, how you communicate, and how you handle uncertainty. The candidates who get offers aren't always the ones who solve the problem. They're the ones who make the interviewer want to work with them. In this talk, I'll pull back the curtain on what technical interviews — both coding and system design — actually measure. You'll learn why talking through a wrong approach can score higher than silently arriving at the right one, why system design interviews aren't looking for the "correct" architecture, and why the soft skills you think are secondary are actually the main event. Drawing from nearly 20 years of real-world experience on both sides of the table, I'll share a practical framework for approaching any technical interview with the right mindset. You'll walk away with concrete strategies you can apply at your next interview — not more algorithm flashcards, but a fundamentally different understanding of what the process is actually testing.