Interviewing questions...
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*doh* note to self, avoid interviews, get hired without one :) Trollslayer wrote: 5. How do you control scope creep ? i fire the managing director and most of the managers, since they are the cause of feature creep Trollslayer wrote: 2. What was your biggest failure ? 4. Name a problem you were unable to solve they are still here, so the feature creep didn't go away :~ apparently my job position does not give me the authority to apply the ideal answer. apparently i also don't get to boss external organisations around, even when management tell me to do so. zen is the art of being at one with the two'ness
Those two are to try and find about the character of the person, how they dealt with being put in that that position, so very useful. There is no right or wrong answer, it's a way of trying to get beyond the appicant's CV. Elaine :rose: The tigress is here :-D
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Trollslayer wrote: Some favourite interview questions: I disagree, Elaine. Trollslayer wrote: What was your biggeest success ? Most programmers may not have a single big success. It's not very useful to try and figure out one big thing you ever achieved (as a coder). Of course, if you are trying to see how well the candidate can talk when there's nothing much to say, this question is useful. Trollslayer wrote: What was your biggest failure ? Again not very useful. People who've read HR books might answer these better than normal coders who haven't. If I was asked this question, I don't know what I'd answer. I've never really had a failure as a programmer - of course I never tried to write a C++ compiler or an OS-kernel or anything like that. But every time a bug has pulled me down, I've eventually fixed it and reached my goal. So my fully honest answer would be - I've never failed - which would obviously go very bad with the interviewer :-) Trollslayer wrote: What is the most difficult problem you have solved ? Would be hard to pin-point any one problem. I'd prefix my reply with "I've been coding too long to pin-point any single problem, but of the problems I've faced in the recent past - say 1 year - this one that I am gonna tell you about was the most difficult..." Trollslayer wrote: Name a problem you were unable to solve None would be my answer because I've never tried to solve something I didn't think I could solve. But again, this'd be a bad answer. Trollslayer wrote: How do you control scope creep ? This is a pretty decent question. But again, the more impressive answers would be given by those guys who've read the right books - which might be a good sign anyway. Nish
Nish, I've interviewed quite a few people and these questions are about going beyond the CV and finding out about the person and how they will cope within the organisation. I frequently have to report to two or three different people and balancing that can be difficult but how I presented my experience with that situation helped me get my last two jobs. Elaine :rose: The tigress is here :-D
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Nish, I've interviewed quite a few people and these questions are about going beyond the CV and finding out about the person and how they will cope within the organisation. I frequently have to report to two or three different people and balancing that can be difficult but how I presented my experience with that situation helped me get my last two jobs. Elaine :rose: The tigress is here :-D
Trollslayer wrote: these questions are about going beyond the CV and finding out about the person and how they will cope within the organisation. OK, that's fair enough. There are no right or wrong answers or even good or bad answers - what the candidate replies helps the interviewer analyze his/her personality/experience-levels I guess.
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I am looking to hire a developer so that I can double my team size to 2. I am responsible for finding, interviewing and ultimately hiring/managing this person. I have read many of the suggestions on this site, and others, regarding best strategies for interviewing/hiring, but I have some questions. The position is more than just coding, it is a true developer position. I want a person who can gather the requirements, design the system, work with the internal users and ultimately write the code. The bottom line is that I want a talented developer who can bring something to the company beyond just writing code. I need someone who can offer good conceptual ideas, read between the lines, and build software systems that really deliver. I have looked at 20-50 resumes and I really haven't seen a resume that just jumps out as outstanding. This is the first time I have been through this process, so I am concerned I am trying to read too much into this. So... How do you screen resumes for talent, not just education and experience? What questions do you ask, on the phone/in person to try and draw out the applicant and understand his/her talents? How succesful are you at drawing them out? What are some good ways to get an applicant to reveal his/her conceptual viewpoint, problem solving strategies, etc? Thanks, Matt Gullett
It doesn't matter how much you interview a person, you'll never really know this person. Be prepared to make a mistake and correct it quickly. Matt Gullett wrote: The bottom line is that I want a talented developer who can bring something to the company beyond just writing code. I need someone who can offer good conceptual ideas, read between the lines, and build software systems that really deliver. I'd be surprised if you wrote: "I want someone stupid. Someone who don't think, and just code anything that seems to work, no matter how buggy it is.". What you want is actually what we all want. And it's hard to detect a good person in an interview. I'm hiring now (BTW, if you are Brazilian and in São Paulo, contact me), and I usually read around 100 CVs to make around 10 interviews. Of those, typically 3 or 4 seem good enough for the job and are probably willing to accept what we have to offer. Of all people we hired, 30% were mistakes. I see dead pixels Yes, even I am blogging now!
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How much are you offering? ;P (just kidding!) Matt Gullett wrote: How do you screen resumes for talent, not just education and experience? Education is useless. Ignore education. Experience is good, but everyone fluffs it up. I guess people that help you write resumes are fluffers, harharhar. So, to check out what they REALLY did, you've got to follow up on references. Also, before bringing anyone in and wasting your and their time, do a short phone interview. Matt Gullett wrote: What are some good ways to get an applicant to reveal his/her conceptual viewpoint, problem solving strategies, etc? Well, I'm very biased, so you're going to get a biased answer. Ask them what's good and bad about using wizards, about the form designer, about the way Visual Studio suggests you create a database application. Ask them if they think in terms of workflows. How do they code workflows? What about database stuff. What's their take on ORM? And I guess, ask them if they've ever done any programming that flies in the face of the "Microsoft way", and if so, why. Problem solving strategies are hard to ask about, because each problem requires a different strategy. Hmmm. There's your answer! Marc My website
Latest Articles: Undo/Redo Buffer Memento Design PatternMarc Clifton wrote: Education is useless. Ignore education. I think that is surely only paritally true. I'd be a little pissed if you're telling me my last three years of hard work in Cambridge getting a respectable degree were worthless....! -- Andrew.
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Marc Clifton wrote: Education is useless. Ignore education. I think that is surely only paritally true. I'd be a little pissed if you're telling me my last three years of hard work in Cambridge getting a respectable degree were worthless....! -- Andrew.
Andrew Peace wrote: I'd be a little pissed if you're telling me my last three years of hard work in Cambridge getting a respectable degree were worthless....! hehe. One of the problems with many courses is that they teach current technologies (or, even worse, the college/university hasn't even caught up to current tech). What you learn in these classes becomes obsolete rather quickly. Certainly there is value in "fundamental" courses on design, architecture, etc., but even these become obsolete, or, if not obsolete, there are often shifts in how these foundational technologies are used. For example, relational databases and object oriented programming are here to say, I imagine, but courses on pure OOD are of less value when considering some of the newer (and less understood) concepts such as aspect oriented programming and declarative programming. Marc My website
Latest Articles: Undo/Redo Buffer Memento Design Pattern -
I am looking to hire a developer so that I can double my team size to 2. I am responsible for finding, interviewing and ultimately hiring/managing this person. I have read many of the suggestions on this site, and others, regarding best strategies for interviewing/hiring, but I have some questions. The position is more than just coding, it is a true developer position. I want a person who can gather the requirements, design the system, work with the internal users and ultimately write the code. The bottom line is that I want a talented developer who can bring something to the company beyond just writing code. I need someone who can offer good conceptual ideas, read between the lines, and build software systems that really deliver. I have looked at 20-50 resumes and I really haven't seen a resume that just jumps out as outstanding. This is the first time I have been through this process, so I am concerned I am trying to read too much into this. So... How do you screen resumes for talent, not just education and experience? What questions do you ask, on the phone/in person to try and draw out the applicant and understand his/her talents? How succesful are you at drawing them out? What are some good ways to get an applicant to reveal his/her conceptual viewpoint, problem solving strategies, etc? Thanks, Matt Gullett
I've never hired a developer, but I've hired and trained and fired many network computer techs and I've come to the conclusion that you only ask them anything at all to get a feel for their personality. For the technical side of things there is nothing that substitutes for a test of somekind as real world as possible. It's utterly impossible to know how proficient a potential employee will be from asking questions, a good bullshitter will seem excellent in an interview but terrible in practice. Sometimes (and this applies heavily in any technical profession) the person will come across terribly in an interview situation, shy, nervous unable to articulate their skills that they actually *do* posess and may be excellent at but just nervous about being in the spotlight. I'd say about 1 in 10 of the people that come across really confident and knowledgeable in an interview are actually like that in day to day work life. The problem with basing this on an interview is also that you tend to hire the people you like the most, it's human nature, but they are not necessarily (and not often) the best for a technical profession. The solution is simple, you devise a simple but unusual project that they can't copy from anywhere else and give them what they would normally get to start a project and ask for a working solution with source code and whatever else you will need. In fact if I was hiring a developer I would post it on a website and skip the interview process entirely until you get the solutions first. Something trivial that they can do in a weekend or so. You then take the best and get them in, interview them, ask them to make a change to the project and resubmit it as if it's working with said internal users. It's painful and time consuming, but an employee is a precious resource and a double edged sword always, they can make you or break you so it pays to devote a *lot* of time to this process. I know it comes usually at the worst time when your hiring *because* you don't have the time and it's busy, but it's one of the most important business decisions you will ever make so you need to try them out in as real world a situation as possible. The only other real alternative to this is doing internships where they work for little or nothing for a trial period but it can be way more disruptive to the business.
"In our civilization, and under our republican form of government, intelligence is so highly honored that it is rewarded by exemption from the cares of office." - Ambrose Bi
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Marc Clifton wrote: Education is useless. Ignore education. I think that is surely only paritally true. I'd be a little pissed if you're telling me my last three years of hard work in Cambridge getting a respectable degree were worthless....! -- Andrew.
I have hired and will hire a person who is self taught for a programming or other technial position over a university educated person every time. Self taught people have developed and show exactly the kind of skills that are necessary in the world today which is adaptability, continuous self learning, pesonal interest in the subject, experience in the real world doing all sorts of unusual things that give them all that knowledge that is the 80% part of what you actually need to know to get by in life and work. On average, a younger person straight out of university is all but unemployable in my not so humble opinion. Once they've seasoned themselves in the real world for a while lost that sense of entitlement that the world owes them etc then they may be an interesting person with some actually useful skills worth hiring and working with but until then I'll let someone else go through that process first.
"In our civilization, and under our republican form of government, intelligence is so highly honored that it is rewarded by exemption from the cares of office." - Ambrose Bierce
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I have hired and will hire a person who is self taught for a programming or other technial position over a university educated person every time. Self taught people have developed and show exactly the kind of skills that are necessary in the world today which is adaptability, continuous self learning, pesonal interest in the subject, experience in the real world doing all sorts of unusual things that give them all that knowledge that is the 80% part of what you actually need to know to get by in life and work. On average, a younger person straight out of university is all but unemployable in my not so humble opinion. Once they've seasoned themselves in the real world for a while lost that sense of entitlement that the world owes them etc then they may be an interesting person with some actually useful skills worth hiring and working with but until then I'll let someone else go through that process first.
"In our civilization, and under our republican form of government, intelligence is so highly honored that it is rewarded by exemption from the cares of office." - Ambrose Bierce
I have to disagree with you - I feel that is an incredibly unfair position to take. There are many bright graduates out there who could beat the socks off an average seasoned developer any day. My course is not a programming course. Of the three years I have been here, I have completed two major projects and attended only a single, 16 lecture course that is directly about programming. The rest of the lecture courses are theoretical, discussing areas such as the theory of types, econmics and law, business, graphics, natural language processing and information retrieval, compilation, information theory, systems modelling.. .the list goes on. None of these have ever lectured me on how to write a program - in fact the university expects us to be able to master that ourselves because we are supposedly bright enough to. I have seen horrendous work by paid devlopers who have guzzled money and made absolute messes of systems in the various temping jobs I did in the summer of my first year to earn a spare bit of cash. I have been interested in computing since I was six, and have programmed since not much older than that - my most acclaimed CP article (beginner's guide to pointers) was written when I was 16 - so don't you think it's a little harsh to exclude me from your consideration simply because I have (or will have soon) a degree, when I might have turned out to be the best person for the job? I agree that many grads are not great, don't understand programming and just bumble along, but that can equally apply to those who were self taught; a person should be judged by their merits and capabilities, not by your generlatisation that a degree makes a bad programmer. -- Andrew.
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It doesn't matter how much you interview a person, you'll never really know this person. Be prepared to make a mistake and correct it quickly. Matt Gullett wrote: The bottom line is that I want a talented developer who can bring something to the company beyond just writing code. I need someone who can offer good conceptual ideas, read between the lines, and build software systems that really deliver. I'd be surprised if you wrote: "I want someone stupid. Someone who don't think, and just code anything that seems to work, no matter how buggy it is.". What you want is actually what we all want. And it's hard to detect a good person in an interview. I'm hiring now (BTW, if you are Brazilian and in São Paulo, contact me), and I usually read around 100 CVs to make around 10 interviews. Of those, typically 3 or 4 seem good enough for the job and are probably willing to accept what we have to offer. Of all people we hired, 30% were mistakes. I see dead pixels Yes, even I am blogging now!
Daniel Turini wrote: Of all people we hired, 30% were mistakes. That's very high for here (UK). Is it typical for Brazil ? The tigress is here :-D
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Daniel Turini wrote: Of all people we hired, 30% were mistakes. That's very high for here (UK). Is it typical for Brazil ? The tigress is here :-D
Trollslayer wrote: That's very high for here (UK). Is it typical for Brazil ? Kind of. We hire only really good programmers and senior programmers, the ammount of knowledge we need to assess in an interview is huge, and this leads to more mistakes. When hiring junior programmers, this is much easier, and the success rate is much higher, but we chose to have a very small team, with very good people and high salaries. In this situation, we expect a lot more from the people who work here. I see dead pixels Yes, even I am blogging now!
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It doesn't matter how much you interview a person, you'll never really know this person. Be prepared to make a mistake and correct it quickly. Matt Gullett wrote: The bottom line is that I want a talented developer who can bring something to the company beyond just writing code. I need someone who can offer good conceptual ideas, read between the lines, and build software systems that really deliver. I'd be surprised if you wrote: "I want someone stupid. Someone who don't think, and just code anything that seems to work, no matter how buggy it is.". What you want is actually what we all want. And it's hard to detect a good person in an interview. I'm hiring now (BTW, if you are Brazilian and in São Paulo, contact me), and I usually read around 100 CVs to make around 10 interviews. Of those, typically 3 or 4 seem good enough for the job and are probably willing to accept what we have to offer. Of all people we hired, 30% were mistakes. I see dead pixels Yes, even I am blogging now!
Daniel Turini wrote: Of all people we hired, 30% were mistakes. Yours or theirs? :-D[
My articles and software tools
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I have to disagree with you - I feel that is an incredibly unfair position to take. There are many bright graduates out there who could beat the socks off an average seasoned developer any day. My course is not a programming course. Of the three years I have been here, I have completed two major projects and attended only a single, 16 lecture course that is directly about programming. The rest of the lecture courses are theoretical, discussing areas such as the theory of types, econmics and law, business, graphics, natural language processing and information retrieval, compilation, information theory, systems modelling.. .the list goes on. None of these have ever lectured me on how to write a program - in fact the university expects us to be able to master that ourselves because we are supposedly bright enough to. I have seen horrendous work by paid devlopers who have guzzled money and made absolute messes of systems in the various temping jobs I did in the summer of my first year to earn a spare bit of cash. I have been interested in computing since I was six, and have programmed since not much older than that - my most acclaimed CP article (beginner's guide to pointers) was written when I was 16 - so don't you think it's a little harsh to exclude me from your consideration simply because I have (or will have soon) a degree, when I might have turned out to be the best person for the job? I agree that many grads are not great, don't understand programming and just bumble along, but that can equally apply to those who were self taught; a person should be judged by their merits and capabilities, not by your generlatisation that a degree makes a bad programmer. -- Andrew.
I think the difference, and one that John would recognise, is that your CV would show all of that ability. I've seen a lot of people myself that briefly list technologies someone heard a bit about whilst at university and then milk their degree for all they can. You can normally spot them as they start with the words "I have a degree in ... and I have experience with ..." and not vice versa. Your pitch should exclusively be based on your skills and abilities with your qualifications taking a follow up role.
Ðavid Wulff The Royal Woofle Museum
Audioscrobbler :: flickrDie Freiheit spielt auf allen Geigen
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Daniel Turini wrote: Of all people we hired, 30% were mistakes. Yours or theirs? :-D[
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Xiangyang Liu wrote: Yours or theirs? I believe both. Some people seem to forget that they should be looking for a good job, not simply looking for a job. I believe (and I do prefer candidates that seem to think this way) that it's the interviewee obligation to ask as many questions as possible to find if the job is right for them, too. Even if some soccer team would be crazy enough to hire me, I'd not accept working as a professional soccer player, because I'm a lousy player. I see dead pixels Yes, even I am blogging now!
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I am looking to hire a developer so that I can double my team size to 2. I am responsible for finding, interviewing and ultimately hiring/managing this person. I have read many of the suggestions on this site, and others, regarding best strategies for interviewing/hiring, but I have some questions. The position is more than just coding, it is a true developer position. I want a person who can gather the requirements, design the system, work with the internal users and ultimately write the code. The bottom line is that I want a talented developer who can bring something to the company beyond just writing code. I need someone who can offer good conceptual ideas, read between the lines, and build software systems that really deliver. I have looked at 20-50 resumes and I really haven't seen a resume that just jumps out as outstanding. This is the first time I have been through this process, so I am concerned I am trying to read too much into this. So... How do you screen resumes for talent, not just education and experience? What questions do you ask, on the phone/in person to try and draw out the applicant and understand his/her talents? How succesful are you at drawing them out? What are some good ways to get an applicant to reveal his/her conceptual viewpoint, problem solving strategies, etc? Thanks, Matt Gullett
Matt Gullett wrote: How do you screen resumes for talent, When we bring a candidate for an interview, we ask them to make a presentation about a recent meaningful project they worked on (omitting any proprietary or confidential details). This has proved very helpful in allowing us to gauge the person's depth of knowledge and maturity as a developer. /ravi My new year's resolution: 2048 x 1536 Home | Articles | Freeware | Music ravib@ravib.com