What do you want for lunch? Interviews are effectively worthless for engineers. Figuring out where to eat isn’t.
??? so grab some peeps from the street and make them senior engineers?
Ask HN: What is your faviorte interview question?
21–30 of 43 posts
Re: Ask HN: What is your faviorte interview question?
#22Call me weird but I like IQ questions.
They're fun to do albeit not a fair judge of candidacy.
Re: Ask HN: What is your faviorte interview question?
#23when can you start?
when can I start?
Re: Ask HN: What is your faviorte interview question?
#24What do you want for lunch? Interviews are effectively worthless for engineers. Figuring out where to eat isn’t.
??? so grab some peeps from the street and make them senior engineers?
What? The implication of interviews are worthless for finding the best senior engineers is not to hire random people off the street. It's to hire people based on their previous work, reputation and recommendations.
Re: Ask HN: What is your faviorte interview question?
#25This: "There's a feature you and several other co-workers are building. The deadline is 3 days from now. You and 'Co-worker A' are tasked in building a module of that feature. You've already written several classes and tried abstracting some repetitive parts that would allow you to hit the target deadline for the team. However 'Co-worker A' has also worked on those same classes and wrote more methods that are too tig…
Cool question, I would probably agree just to get the feature out (if it's really essential) but at the condition that the first thing that will be done after release is to change those methods otherwise it will never be done.
Re: Ask HN: What is your faviorte interview question?
#26"Tell me about a time when technology really pissed you off"
I usually word this is a more "work-safe" way, but I find that this question has the benefit of both relaxing a candidate, and giving them a great opportunity to talk about their experiences without a filter. I usually follow-up with questions about the tech if it's not something I'm familiar with, and some questions around what they did to get around the issue, or what they'd do if they could change the particular bit of software.
Re: Ask HN: What is your faviorte interview question?
#27What's your biggest mistake and how did you recover from it?
It was for an Engineering Project Manager role. Yep, got the role.
Re: Ask HN: What is your faviorte interview question?
#28"What's your developer story?". Like, I ask them how they ended up being a developer. Not something that helps me judge them, but the stories sometimes are pretty interesting and sometimes shows if someone really loves their job, or are a developer just for the sake of working.
Re: Ask HN: What is your faviorte interview question?
#29What do you want for lunch? Interviews are effectively worthless for engineers. Figuring out where to eat isn’t.
I used to joke that a candidate should drive the group to lunch. There was a correlation between someone’s coding style and the way they drove a car in heavy traffic with others in the car.
Totally unreasonable and probably illegal, but still something that crosses my mind in interviews.
Re: Ask HN: What is your faviorte interview question?
#30Remember that interviews are also castings for new teammates so present yourself as a person they would like to spend time with. So asking people that you will be probably working closely with about their hobbies and interests is a good way to find connection with them.