I’ve done a lot of interviews and hiring in my career, and so like most people who have this experience, I have my own library of questions I tend to ask. I was conducting an interview the other day and I asked a common one, along the lines of “Is it your preference to have standard checklists and processes to follow? Or do you prefer being self-directed and having autonomy?”

Of course the person answered that they prefer the autonomy, and during the interview I realized that almost every single candidate I’ve interviewed says that. And of course they did! No one is going to say to an interviewer, “No, I am not self-directed. I need to be told exactly what to do and how to do it.”

But, my experience tells me that’s not true. In fact, fairly recently I was at an internal team offsite where we were having some candid conversations on our team’s work processes, and an overwhelming message from the team was that they felt like we did not enough standardized processes, design patterns, or runbooks. They almost unanimously stated they were frustrated with having to figure out how to do their jobs, and wanted more standardized content. Given that our outcomes are well-defined, this flies directly in the face of, “I don’t want to be told what to do. I like having freedom to be creative.”

What I suspect that really means is just, “I don’t want to have to give lots of detailed status reports. Give me a checklist and leave me alone in the corner and I’ll follow the checklist.”

(Which ACTUALLY really just probably means, “I don’t want any accountability.”)

Anyways, I’m removing that question from my library of interview questions.