A big part of recent lectures has been the idea of being fair to those you work with; don’t be an asshole and good things come to you.

Well, not to such extremes, but the point is made. It started me thinking about how I conduct interviews, and what I’ve started calling ‘not catching the trust fall’. When someones answers a question in an interview, they almost expect you to fill the ensuing space with another question. Their mind empties for the next question, and when you leave them hanging they grasp for whatever most relevant is left. The answer you get after this pause is usually the purest answer you’ll get, and due to it’s shortness it just so happens to be the most quotable. I got this idea from a seminar in high school, but only recently did I begin to think of it as outright manipulation; by not catching their trust fall, I might get a split second of awesome, but I still let them fall. I don’t know if I can ever really be comfortable with this notion, but I guess I’ll have to find out.