Thoughts on interview questions

submitted by trident765 from (self.programming)

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[–]fschmidt 3 insightful - 2 fun3 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 2 fun -  (1 child)

This continues from here.

I could also ask "Is programming an individual effort, a team effort, or does it depend on the project?"

"Team" is a meaningless term. I would rephrase this as "Is the best way to organize a programming team for each programmer to take responsibility for a part of the code and team members help each other as needed, or is it better if team members share responsibility for code?".

Another possible question would be to show the candidate 2 code samples that do the same thing, one written in a simple readable style and one written in a modern unreadable style. Ask him which he prefers and why.

Of course all this depends on to what degree your teammates are modern scum. Modern culture is fundamentally sociopathic and places the highest value on charisma and the lowest value on competence.

[–]trident765[S] 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

I didn't ask a question because they loved him too much and I didn't want to spoil their fun. It looks like he is going to be offered the job.

Of course all this depends on to what degree your teammates are modern scum.

I think they are non-scum, but they are naive non-scum. They have good values, write good software, but they fell for this guy who I strongly suspect has values that are contrary to theirs, because they fell for his charisma and virtue signaling (for example, he kept mentioning how he was a "proud new dad" and included photos of his infant kids in his presentation and his resume).

In the panel interview someone asked him a question similar to the question about teams, and he responded saying he prefers software development to be "dynamic" (by the way, modern scum love using vaguely defined words) and I think by this he meant that multiple people contribute to a software because afterwards he made a joke about how he gets overwhelmed when he is solely responsible for a software. One of the people on the panel who especially loved this guy said "that's great we do that here too! We each have our own projects we are responsible for, and then every once in a while we work together on the things that overlap". Basically he "corrected" the answer for him, and moved on. He didn't dig deeper, or ask him to clarify what he meant by "dynamic", because he liked his charisma so much that he was almost afraid of prying more, for fear of finding out something that would hurt his candidacy.

When I submitted my review of the candidate, I said that I was impressed by his presentation and experience, but that I felt like I knew very little about his personality, because the panel did not ask him any concrete questions about situations in the workplace, and I recommended for the next panel to ask more personality questions. Even by leaving this I felt like I was being too critical, because of how much everyone else loved him.

I think it is horrible that my teammates allowed themselves to be disarmed by this guy's public speaking skills. Just because someone is good at public speaking doesn't mean he will be a pleasant person to work with. They should have reflected on their values prior to the interview, and then asked questions to make sure the candidate's values were values that they found tolerable. But they liked his public speaking skills so they just assumed his values were good and gave him a "freebie" in that aspect of the interview.