Nice. I have a question and a couple of suggestions:
Company that currently employs me doesn’t expect candidates to know answers to “trivia” questions. During interviews we allow candidates to make up any reasonable API they might want to use. Do you think answer like “I didn’t use Filter() in a while so I’d look it up details before actually using it(a few minutes of reading documentation vs hours of debugging). Roughly it...” would work well (for something you don’t use so often you know it by heart)?
I think making the interview pleasant for your interviewer does increase your chance of success / good feedback in case the company rejects you. I don’t see it mentioned in advice I read. Maybe it’s just obvious for almost everyone but me but I think mentioning that can really help people who have technical skills but didn’t think about it.
One really useful piece of advice I got when I was interviewing was to practice answering interview questions by writing on paper / whiteboard. I had to write code using one of those during my interviews and I would have much more trouble if my writing speed was as low as it was when I started practicing (after limiting myself to writing using keyboard for some years).
I think you’re mixing a few questions that seem distinct to me:
1. Are there good reasons to be suspicious of advice that advice giver doesn’t follow themselves?
2. Is there a good reason to support social norms against hypocrisy?
3. Are there good reasons to avoid giving advice that I don’t follow myself?
@1. I think hypocrisy is always a evidence for the advice being poor. It’s not a very strong evidence. If I can easily check sources, reasoning and evaluate results of taking the advice it’s probably not worth worrying much about it.
But sometimes it’s only evidence you get that social norms allow you to use.
@2. I think so. You might need those norms yourself to get out of situation when social norms don’t let you use some other evidence you have.
You might want to keep them in place so that other people who are in situations where they can’t use some evidence they have because of social norms to get out.
@3. I think it’s ok to offer advice that you don’t follow yourself but I try to include a warning for recipient to be more cautious if they try to follow it[0].
[0] Assume I want the recipient to do well.