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The Mother of All Interview Questions

raganwald.posterous.com

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Re: The Mother of All Interview Questions

#21

Post by lambda_cube »

Thank you Reginald. You always make me think, more reliably than any other writer about software. You pose interesting questions and have interesting viewpoints and discussion related to those questions. I hope you feel proud about this ability, because you should.

I also appreciate that you have chosen to publish your writing more in a blog format just like on http://weblog.raganwald.com instead of the GitHub experiment, I never really got into reading your stuff there.

As for the question posed, I believe I'm biased towards invention. I would prefer to work in a research department in a company or in a small company that have a business idea (partly) based on research. I hope I'm wise enough to avoid NIH, that is not really inventing anyway, so it's not as much fun as real inventing. (Working in a university seems to come with too much bureaucracy for my taste, but I do like the teaching part.)

Re: The Mother of All Interview Questions

#22

Post by raganwald »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #20
raganwald wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The question of bias is an excellent one to ponder. I agree that my phrasing is biased, but so is: The last three times you faced a "build or buy (/use open source)” situation, which did you choose, and why? ...in a way, as it only covers places where there is a perception that there was a straight-up choice. One of the things I am interested in is places where the invetion-oriented folks didn’t perceive there was a…

When I was at Google I wished they had a few 'uncoders', people who made it their goal in life to leave the source tree with fewer lines of source than they found it. True story: I went to a talk given by one of the 'engineering elders' (these were low Emp# engineers who were considered quite successful and were to be emulated by the workers :-) This person stated when they came to work at Google they were given the…

Marvellous anecdote and some incredibly sage advice about interpreteting someone’s evidence of how smart they are and how much they get done. Thank you.

Re: The Mother of All Interview Questions

#23

Post by rokhayakebe »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #20
raganwald wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The question of bias is an excellent one to ponder. I agree that my phrasing is biased, but so is: The last three times you faced a "build or buy (/use open source)” situation, which did you choose, and why? ...in a way, as it only covers places where there is a perception that there was a straight-up choice. One of the things I am interested in is places where the invetion-oriented folks didn’t perceive there was a…

When I was at Google I wished they had a few 'uncoders', people who made it their goal in life to leave the source tree with fewer lines of source than they found it. True story: I went to a talk given by one of the 'engineering elders' (these were low Emp# engineers who were considered quite successful and were to be emulated by the workers :-) This person stated when they came to work at Google they were given the…

Similar story here. The company I work for had a system that worked just fine, but apparently lots of things weren't done the right way, documentation was lacking etc... They decided to rewrite the whole thing, incorporate processes and after nearly 18 months of hard work they relaunch the app. That was the last time anything worked properly. Now we are left with a beautiful system that just doesn't work.

Re: The Mother of All Interview Questions

#24

Post by fendabender »

There's probably nothing truly new in the context as 'new' in the question needs qualification. Following on does invent mean, bring to the table [as they've done something similar elsewhere] or something innovative. Some questions might sound great, but they have to placed within context and not just thought up as being clever, but they actually have a YARDSTICK to measure the candidate.

I'm not a programmer, I just do mark-up but I do like the question as it's a development of personal and business aspects of the candidate.

With interview it will show:

Does the candidate show initiative, problem solving and application. Finally, it ought to involve an answer of business acumen: Does spending 6 months developing it vs. returns of a version update. This ought to show a right fit and if the candidate can 'fit' to the business and process aims of the company.

Re: The Mother of All Interview Questions

#25

Post by euroclydon »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #20
raganwald wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The question of bias is an excellent one to ponder. I agree that my phrasing is biased, but so is: The last three times you faced a "build or buy (/use open source)” situation, which did you choose, and why? ...in a way, as it only covers places where there is a perception that there was a straight-up choice. One of the things I am interested in is places where the invetion-oriented folks didn’t perceive there was a…

When I was at Google I wished they had a few 'uncoders', people who made it their goal in life to leave the source tree with fewer lines of source than they found it. True story: I went to a talk given by one of the 'engineering elders' (these were low Emp# engineers who were considered quite successful and were to be emulated by the workers :-) This person stated when they came to work at Google they were given the…

Your asking us to assume that an unspoken goal in that particular software development endeavor was to not grow the total amount of code or libraries or systems, unless absolutely necessary. But was it? What if minimal system growth was a goal, but weighted at 0.5 and just get something running was also a goal, weighted at 0.99, because there was lot of money to be made with a working system.

Re: The Mother of All Interview Questions

#26

Post by 43P04T34 »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #20
raganwald wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The question of bias is an excellent one to ponder. I agree that my phrasing is biased, but so is: The last three times you faced a "build or buy (/use open source)” situation, which did you choose, and why? ...in a way, as it only covers places where there is a perception that there was a straight-up choice. One of the things I am interested in is places where the invetion-oriented folks didn’t perceive there was a…

When I was at Google I wished they had a few 'uncoders', people who made it their goal in life to leave the source tree with fewer lines of source than they found it. True story: I went to a talk given by one of the 'engineering elders' (these were low Emp# engineers who were considered quite successful and were to be emulated by the workers :-) This person stated when they came to work at Google they were given the…

I hired a guy who did that once. Twice, actually, ten years apart. One was right out of the military and one was right out of the university. It would have been the biggest mistake of my life not to have hired each of them. They each created something awesome with no help from anyone except me. They each literally changed the world.

Re: The Mother of All Interview Questions

#27

Post by hackinthebochs »

ibejoeb wrote: post #7

That is a pretty cool question. Aside from ferreting out the mentality of the candidate or team (like are you bio-sciences and need to invent, or are you a CRM software maker and have NIH?), it probably tells a lot about the kinds of problem you're dealing with. It turns out that I don't invent anything. I discover things that I never realized and perhaps nobody else has realized. Things like commonalities in seeming…

The problem with this is that its just too damn ambiguous. What does "discover" mean in the context of software development? You have your own idea (which is a good one), but communicating that to a candidate so you're on the same page might take more time than its worth.

Re: The Mother of All Interview Questions

#28

Post by barce »

fendabender wrote: post #24

There's probably nothing truly new in the context as 'new' in the question needs qualification. Following on does invent mean, bring to the table [as they've done something similar elsewhere] or something innovative. Some questions might sound great, but they have to placed within context and not just thought up as being clever, but they actually have a YARDSTICK to measure the candidate. I'm not a programmer, I just…

This question is a great yardstick. If you are at a startup and want to swing for the fences, this question makes very clear your intentions.

Re: The Mother of All Interview Questions

#30

Post by troels »

raganwald wrote: post #19
troels wrote: post #18

That blog post is less about interviewing than the title suggests. It's an interesting dichotomy.

One of the reasons that discussions about interview questions/techniques generate such heated discussions is because they cut right to the core of our self-image and mercilessly strip naked our views about software development.

On a related note, job interviews (some times) have a special quality that you rarely meet in other situations. I think for those exact reasons.

Of course another explanation could be that I'm narcissistic and it's the perfect setting to talk about my self. But then I equally enjoy interviewing candidates, so perhaps not.

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