The point of that question is to see what the candidate will talk about. If they start talking about refraction so be it.

I might go with "can you clarify what context?", if you can't infer it from the job description. Your wording could be interpreted as fishing for reminders.

"Broadly speaking an interface is a contract exposing some elements that can be used to interact with a system from the outside. Narrowing things down a lot an interface in, say the Java programming language, is a name for a set of methods that classes implementing that interface must provide (and also some that are optional). Would you like to explore this topic further?"

would be my answer.

As someone who interviewed people for technical roles, I'd see that as a bad sign and answer: "Just tell me what you can think about."

This isn't school where teachers give you trick questions and you fail if you misunderstand it. If you are applying as a software developer and you can't talk at length about various forms of interfaces you are probably not very experienced. UI, API, ABI are all interfaces..

And then hope that you are talking to somebody from a minority of job interviewers that are actually reasonable or trained into answering.

As a matter of fact, yes, that's the best approach, but only because if you receive a question like the OP's, you've already lost and have to just take a blind bet.

I love how yours is the sane answer and the replies to your comment basically hinge on the interviewer playing mind games. Seems like nobody cares anymore about communication skills and how it's supposed to be a two way street. Though on one of the comments I might've missed the sarcasm considering the suggestion of ending the answer with a classic LLM trope.

Now if a terse question deserves a terse answer that's to be judged on a case by case basis, I suppose.

So far, in my experience, that kind of clarification question is highly correlated to be followed by a firehose of bullshit.

But I keep an open mind, and am always ready to be pleasantly surprised.

If you're not a Junior and that's all you have to say without even attempting to approach the actual question, you would be raising a red flag with me. Maybe there are better ways to phrase that counter-question, but this one in particular made me twitch.

In my experience, outlining one or a few things you call interfaces would be a much better display of both knowledge and attitude: GUI, API, interface keyword or concept in some programming language, etc. Even better, add a quick description of what they all have in common ("broadly speaking, a way to access a set of functionality" or something like that).

And THEN you may ask "would you like me to elaborate on one meaning in particular?"

This is in fact one of my two requirements when interviewing: I want to hear the candidate say "I don't know" to a question. The other is that I want to hear them talk passionately about some project they once did. Bullshitting is an immediate fail.

There is also small computer systems interface or SCSI.

But in Object Oriented Programming an interface is also a class with only pure virtual methods, which is the interpretation that came most naturally to my detail-oriented mind. In this case it’s not a translation boundary, but rather a way to abstract away the details of which thing you’re actually talking to.

Maybe the interviewer is okay with either answer, but I could easily see this question resulting in bzzt, you’re wrong if you happen to be thinking the way the interviewer isn’t.

I'm interviewing. I'm just not getting answers back. I have 9 YOE now so I've done the usual gauntlet hundreds of times by now.

Paet of it is that a lot of places just aren't hiring to begin with. So I guess I shouldn't be surprised that those who remain either have poor processes (maybe some by design) or don't know how to find what they are looking for.

Hope you just overlooked the auto-playing video ads due to the pressure of the interview. When can you start?

Usually the interviewer has particular definition in mind and you need to guess it to pass to the next stages.

You’d think that but I remember one interview where the candidate was highly recommended and they had never communicated with a stakeholder. A PM had always done that. They had never talked with a user. Ever. They had 15 years of experience.

It’s funny the stuff I assume is really easy and common and keep getting reminded that the world is really diverse.

I mean...that's what the job is.

I did one of those when applying to my current job which adjusted based on how well you did. But it leaned quite hard into theory and details rather than writing code. Bitwise logic puzzles that would be hard to solve without being schooled in c or find that kind of puzzles fun.

I got things like inverting signed values 2-complement form, or bit shifting a float, or casting structs to arrays and poking at the bytes.

After starting i asked them if they had checked with AI, and they had apparently tested the quiz and it scored quite bad, so it was a good filter. (even if a-lot of the questions leaned more into puzzle solving than coding or design)

Wait, how does this thing work?

Can't you just vibe-code your way through it?

Genuinely curious on your thoughts on this idea here.

This is also why I specifically told the recruiter at my employer to never ask me to do the 1st phone round. Too many under qualified people at this stage and it's depressing to write No Hire again and again.