HumanWORKS

Have you ever sat through an interview where someone treated your ability to recall the SSH port number as some profound indicator of professional competence?

If you’re an engineer with any breadth of experience, you’ll recognise this particular form of intellectual theatre – the worst interviews I’ve attended invariably focus on the recall of specific data points as a proxy for actual understanding. This sort of posturing (because let’s call it what it is) amounts to technical peacocking masquerading as dialogue, as if remembering that SSH runs over port 22 has any measurable impact on one’s ability to build systems that actually work.

The challenge isn’t merely that these questions are pointless – though they demonstrably are. The deeper problem is that they reveal a fundamental confusion about what we’re trying to assess and why.

The Metacognitive Distinction

Having built much of our current technical advisory capability at CGI, I’ve sought to disrupt this interviewing paradigm, not through any particular genius-level insight, but by understanding the difference between information recall and metacognition – the capacity to think about thinking itself.

The reason metacognitive questions prove more illuminating in interviews is straightforward: asking someone to examine their own thought processes reveals far more about their intellectual architecture than basic recall exercises ever could. These questions possess an authenticity that standard interview scripts cannot replicate – they require organic thinking in real time, demand genuine self-awareness, and resist the kind of rehearsed responses that ambitious candidates memorise for predictable enquiries about “biggest weaknesses.”

Consider the practical implications. Whether you operate in technology or any other organisational domain, you work within systems that combine processes and tools in ways broadly similar to how our organisation functions. The specific technologies may vary – from quantum computing to a shovel and an expanse of dirt – but the underlying cognitive demands remain consistent: how do you approach problems you haven’t encountered before? How do you adapt when familiar solutions no longer apply?

This is where traditional interview design fails most spectacularly. We test for information that becomes outdated, forgetting that paradigms shift with uncomfortable regularity. There was a time when serious people believed the sun revolved around the earth, and suggesting otherwise carried genuine personal risk. The SSH port number that seems so crucial today may prove entirely irrelevant tomorrow when some new protocol architecture emerges.

The Learning Method Question

My initial attempt to address this focused on adaptability: how might someone approach a new technology following a paradigm shift? The technology itself was deliberately irrelevant – it could range from a programming language to woodworking tools to organisational design methodologies. I wanted to understand method, not specific knowledge.

Where this approach proved limiting was twofold. First, candidates often missed the point entirely, providing detailed implementation steps when I was seeking insight into their learning architecture. Second, whilst the responses effectively revealed learning styles – visual, auditory, kinesthetic approaches dressed in less technical language – they offered limited scope for understanding the person’s broader intellectual character.

The question that replaced it has proven far more illuminating: “Of all your strongly held beliefs, which one do you think is most likely wrong?“

The Authenticity Detection System

What makes this question particularly valuable is not the specific answer – I obviously cannot know what beliefs you hold or which deserve questioning – but rather what becomes evident in the response. You will either engage intellectually or you won’t. You will tell the truth or you won’t. The difference between authentic intellectual engagement and what I can only describe as shorthand nonsense becomes immediately apparent.

I don’t claim expertise in behavioural analysis, but distinguishing genuine thinking from performative cleverness requires no special training. Those who can engage with this question create what people have described as genuinely conversational interviews – some have called them podcast-like, others have mentioned experiencing something approaching an existential crisis when forced to examine whether they actually believe in God or whether faith serves as an elaborate coping mechanism for mortality anxiety.

Those who cannot or will not engage with this process find themselves in probably the most uncomfortable interview of their professional lives. This discomfort emerges not from sadistic design but from the simple reality that our team’s success depends on the ability to think differently and, by extension, to think about thinking itself.

The Purpose Dimension

The second question I deploy explores something larger than immediate professional competence: “What cause or purpose would you consider worth significant personal sacrifice – or even your own death – to advance?”

Again, no right or wrong answers exist. Whether someone finds meaning through military service, family protection, religious conviction, or community volunteering reveals their personal values architecture, not their professional suitability. What I’m examining is whether they’ve developed any sense of purpose beyond immediate self-interest.

This matters because – perhaps worryingly – most of my professional and personal heroes ended up dying for their convictions. I was initially going to note that all my personal heroes are dead, but that seemed rather obviously true for anyone with historical perspective. The specific truth is that those whose commitment to principles transcended personal safety created the kind of impact worth emulating.

I ask this because teams function effectively when members understand something beyond their individual advancement. In my experience, those who believe the world begins and ends with their personal success need to stay as far away from collaborative environments as possible. I have said in casual conversation that a team of Cristiano Ronaldos can be, and often is, outplayed by a cohesive team – individual brilliance, admirable as it is, yields little without the benefits of collaboration.

The Anti-Pattern Advantage

This approach draws from my background in amateur debating societies, where I learned that those who cannot articulate the benefits of opposing arguments are merely spouting rhetoric, regardless of eloquence. Understanding why intelligent people might reasonably disagree with your position provides strategic advantage that pure advocacy cannot match.

The same principle applies to organisational assessment. Rather than testing whether candidates can recite information available through thirty seconds of internet searching, we examine how they process uncertainty, approach unfamiliar problems, and integrate new information with existing frameworks. These cognitive capabilities determine actual job performance far more accurately than memorised technical specifications ever could.

The Implementation Reality

The questions I’ve described cannot be gamed through preparation. They require authentic self-reflection and real-time intellectual processing. When someone attempts to provide a rehearsed response to “which belief is most likely wrong,” the artificiality becomes immediately obvious. When they genuinely engage with the question, you witness actual thinking in action – precisely what you need to evaluate.

This methodology has proven particularly effective because it bypasses the entire infrastructure of interview preparation that has evolved around predictable question formats. Career coaches cannot script responses to genuine metacognitive enquiries. ChatGPT cannot generate authentic self-doubt. The candidate must actually think, and in thinking, reveal the intellectual qualities that determine whether they can contribute meaningfully to complex, collaborative work.

Beyond the SSH Port Fallacy

The next time you prepare to interview someone into your organisation, consider what your questions actually assess. Are you validating the candidate’s suitability, or are you satisfying your own desire to demonstrate superior knowledge? Are you testing abilities that matter for the role, or are you engaging in the kind of intellectual preening that mistakes Google-searchable information for professional competence?

The difference matters more than most organisations recognise. In an era where information becomes obsolete increasingly rapidly, the capacity to think clearly, adapt effectively, and collaborate authentically determines success far more than the ability to recite technical specifications. Interview design should reflect this reality.

The SSH port will always be 22 until it isn’t. The ability to think well about new problems will remain valuable regardless of which protocols emerge next. Design your assessment process accordingly.

Finally, as I prepare to close, let me ask you to think about some of your beliefs and what purpose they serve for you. Are they identity reinforcing? Of value? Or worth examining more closely? This might pertain to questioning your political allegiance by seriously considering the opposing view, examining your position on Brexit by genuinely engaging with the alternative perspective, or any other strongly held conviction that deserves scrutiny.

Because the truth is that whatever we think we know about evaluating human capability – or anything else for that matter – there remains scope to learn more, particularly if we’re willing to think seriously about how we think about these problems in the first place. The only way we progress as beings is by fundamentally questioning everything, including our own internal wetware.

That willingness to examine our own assumptions might be the most valuable capability of all.

This article was initially written on July 10th, 2025 on my personal LinkedIn profile as Beyond Technical Peacocking: Designing Interviews That Reveal How People Think – the original is available via this link: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/beyond-technical-peacocking-designing-interviews-how-matt-turvey-frsa-eausf/?trackingId=7ba5tMAyT9%2BOo7TPy7NENQ%3D%3D