Teach me something in five minutes

The interviewer leaned back and said to pretend they were five and teach them something in five minutes. The candidate, nervous and very prepared for every normal question, opened a browser and taught them how to Google. It was funny. It was also not the job. They did not get it.

A different person, asked a cousin of this question, picked up a baseball and taught a curveball. That one lands better, because the point was never the topic. It was whether you can start from zero with someone who does not share your vocabulary, without sighing.

What to teach instead

Pick a tiny piece of the work: how a bug report becomes a fix, how you read a chart, how a pull request gets reviewed. Use one object if you have one. Stop before the jargon. If you hear yourself say “basically it’s like,” you are about to hide the lesson inside a metaphor. Say the step.

The question feels like a party trick. It is a management question in a costume. The mentoring question nobody warned you about wears a different costume and asks the same thing.