So the trick is to not answer the question immediately if you're unsure, but ask to clarify. Which, again, is a good skill in life (as an IC, and certainly as a director of engineering). If you're reviewing your coworker's code and they got something wrong, asking "Can you clarify what you meant here" will go over ten times better than "You're wrong" (and a hundred times better if they're not in fact wrong). Maybe this is a bug in human cognition, sure, but at a Google-sized company you can't get anything technical done without interfacing with buggy humans on a regular basis.
"The KILL signal? So you're calling the kill function with KILL as an argument, or typing kill dash KILL, or...?" would have cleared up the confusion immediately, because even a screener unfamiliar with the material would have said "Oh, that's not what I'm asking."
I do strongly believe that the questions as written down are not as reported in this blog post, because there are tons of other sources who have written about being asked this question in an initial screen, and they all phrase it as "What is the signal that the kill command sends."
"The KILL signal? So you're calling the kill function with KILL as an argument, or typing kill dash KILL, or...?" would have cleared up the confusion immediately, because even a screener unfamiliar with the material would have said "Oh, that's not what I'm asking."
I do strongly believe that the questions as written down are not as reported in this blog post, because there are tons of other sources who have written about being asked this question in an initial screen, and they all phrase it as "What is the signal that the kill command sends."