Becoming a dungeon master for an interview

I do something related to this in the interview. Part of the interview is more like things you'd tell a colleague who was considering that: pretty accurate characterization of what you know of the work, your idea of pros, things that might or might not be cons for the person, etc.

Basically, they show up the first day, and their interactions with me are just the same (plus a little extra excitement on my part that they joined, and now able to share proprietary details but without unpleasant surprises). Six months later, and I'm still just the same (plus extra familiarity and increased mutual trust). And hopefully they also are what they seemed to be in the interview.

Though you can't necessarily be 100% candid about everything in an interview, like if you were doing an internal assessment a technology, product, vendor, or competitor. For example, there are personnel issues, company image, proprietary tech, etc. Also, you don't want to say something that ends up misleadingly quoted out of context on a jobs forum or word-of-mouth by someone with a different sense of professionalism or confidentiality, and you don't want to give ammo to a spy from a competitor.

In practice, the line of what to say seems pretty intuitive to hit, and I haven't knowingly had a problem with it. Though, when working at one company doing exotic-sounding, high-value-sounding stuff, I did have a couple candidates grill me on the tech and/or on resources. On those I try to respond something like, "Some of that is very proprietary, and unfortunately can't be talked about much right now until someone joins the team. But I can tell you some of the public information from news articles and such is A, B, and C. There's a few marketecture diagrams on our Web site, and links to some published research papers that detail those aspects better than I could."

1: define the requirements for the job

2: devise questions that attempt to give insight into how well the candidate might meet that requirement

3: note down the candidates suitability out of ten for each question

4: TALK to the candidate in a free flowing and open discussion about their work, what they have done, how they built it, why they built it that way, their role in the project, what went right, what went wrong, what they would do differently.

5: Whether or not the candidate asks questions is a meaningless measure. What is meaningful is to sense their level of curiosity - about this job that you are offering, about computing and technology in general. Software development is hard and being good at it requires a level of curiosity. It's probably a concern if someone shows no curiosity in this job or software, though you need to be cautious about how you measure this - did you do a good enough job to explore their level of curiosity? Curiosity does not necessarily reveal itself without careful probing.

6: Discuss the actual work of this job with the candidate. Quickly run through the actual todo list of things that need to be done right now - talk through the hardest of those tasks - how would they approach it?

7: take a leap and employ the person you feel is right - do NOT go into ever deeper analysis, ever more interviews, ever more tests and checks and hoops. No matter how much interviewing you do, you probably won't really know how someone goes in this job until they've been in it 3 or more months.

8: Don't be so risk averse that you don't hire anyone. Do it based on your best guess. it might sound harsh, but do your best and be willing to fire them before their 3 month trial is up if they are not the right person.

9: Take into account enthusiasm - how much does this person want this job? And no, do NOT measure this until the end of the interview process - looking for enthusiasm in a cover letter is like wanting a girlfriend/boyfriend commitment before first date.

10: Pay more than people expect, if you can. $1K less than someone says they want/need reduces first day enthusiasm for the job, $1K more increases first day enthusiasm. Wind the numbers up and down for greater impact.

11: After the interview process is done, talk to referees, analyses interview results apples versus apples.

12: Interview gimmicks, leetcode, abstract questions should be red flags for interviewees. If you're looking for a job and find yourself in a silly interview, be willing to politely call it off and save yourself the time and hassle of dealing with a company that does not know how to recruit software developers.