Mass interviewing roundup

A couple of months ago I volunteered to interview some potential candidates at the company I work for in my hometown. They asked me to create a quick interview guide for the front-end profile.

I’ll admit I randomly googled a few questions and called it a day. While reviewing some of my basic skills in software development I got this aha! on what I usually do on my daily basis and what I should ask if someone wanted to replace me at my job or what I think would make the “10x ideal super programmer” that we should aspire to become.

The ideal interview would let you evaluate if your candidate is a good teammate and has the required technical skills to carry out the tasks.

1. Communication skills:

By interviewing a bunch of people I noticed that a personal bias emerged towards the people that were outspoken and knew how to express, even though they didn’t meet my technical baseline.

At least half of them don’t try to elaborate or expand ideas when asked about a language or framework. This is a sign that they don’t have the enough experience so they shut up instead of guessing and looking dumb or that they can’t communicate clearly so they don’t even try.

Now, of course some people are afraid of interviews, are shy or don’t want to be seen as too talkative to give a good first impression. But I’d rather have the interviewee toss the ball back when talking. Engaging in the interview in some way to give an impression that he/she is can communicate and develop further ideas and is interested in learning and developing their skills.

And nowadays most of the software development industry revolves around in the english language. Imagine how hard can it be that if you can’t communicate in your native tongue you’re thrown into a second language. I’ve worked for english speakers and seen great coders not being able to explain themselves clearly, which in turn makes the work harder.

Communication is a key for every human relationship towards a goal.

2. Technical skills:

Technical interviews and question banks are not the ideal tool for evaluating developers. I feel like shooting up random questions can be a lot like playing Jeopardy. Some questions you can answer them and explain right away, but others you won’t simply push the button right away to answer. I think the main goal about random questions is filtering out job hoppers and liars. But in the end it does matter if you can at least answer some questions.

Ideally you would like at least to see some of their work since it would give you a picture of what he/she contributed to. Remember not everyone loves coding or are creative enough to do them outside office hours.

Conclusion

Interviewing is hard and can be boring for both parties. Hopefully we can get better at evaluating possible employees.