What to Do If You Blank Out Completely

With almost any technical challenge, if you have the right approach, you can figure out a way to solve a problem. But what if you genuinely have no idea where to start?

So let's address something quickly-- if you really have no clue, here's what to do.

Let's say you're a frontend engineer with a few years of Javascript Single Page App development under your belt. You're asked the following technical question in an interview.

When would you apply asynchronous communication between two backend systems?

You freeze, and suddenly your chest tightens. You've never worked on any backend systems, and you've forgotten what asynchronous means. For a few seconds, you stare at the interviewer, and your mind has nowhere to go.

Here's two potential ways to address this:

1. Link it to something you've done
2. Emphasize how excited you are to learn and work on such things

The first response works because it still allows you to demonstrate your experience:

I haven't directly worked on backend systems, but can you remind me what asynchronous means again? Ah, a form of a programming that allows work to be done separately from the primary application thread? I've done something similar with React-- sometimes inserting data into the database via a REST endpoint takes some time, but we want to give immediate feedback to the user that it's being persisted. So my educated guess is that it would be when you want to have a process do something while waiting for something else to complete.

In this case, it may not be 100% what the interviewer wanted to hear, but you've shown some technical acumen. You were also able to include some discussion about past experiences.

On the other hand, what if there's nothing at all you can relate the question to? Talking about how excited you are and how you would learn this might be a good alternative:

To be honest, I'm not sure, but I've heard the term asynchronous and would love to learn more about backend systems. I'll be sure to read up on it after this interview, do you recommend any books or articles to start with?