Interview manifesto

...or how to drive your interview and hire people. Based on real life examples and experience.

General

0. Etiquette

• Say hello!
• Ask how is a candidate?
• Is everything okay?
• Suggest a water/coffee/tea/juice/etc.
• Simple things to make a situation less stressful.

1. Introduce yourself

• Every interview is a stress for a candidate (and also for an interviewer).
• Make the situation more enjoyable.
• Try to make it comfy and relaxed.
• To make this - start a simple dialog.
• Introduce yourself.
• What is your experience?
• Describe your current project.
• How long do you work here?
• What makes it cool?
• (Maybe) what can be done better?

2. Ask about candidates experience

• That's a starting point to understand who is in front of you.
• CV is a good thing, same as Github, Stackoverflow or personal blog.
• But during real conversation you will get much more details.
• Off course if you will ask for them.

3. What technologies are you familiar with?

• You will see how deep or wide candidates knowledge is.
• What parts of your language/framework sucks?
• What other technologies are you interested in but don't have ability to try?
• Any personal projects? own business? or plans?

4. Do not ask 'Why do you want to work here?'

• Money, everything else is a bullshit.

5. Looks for the candidates that:

• Is able to grow with a team (junior-middle)
• Is able to grow a team and company (middle-senior)
• Is able to introduce new things to a team (junior-middle-senior)

Junior developer

0. TODO

1. Check candidates logic

• Why programming makes candidate happy?

  • money, for sure, as everyone
  • but what makes it more enjoable?

• Who does candidate looks for the answer?

  • Is he/she able to Google the answer?

• How a web service can be debugged?

  • is this an app or infra problem?
  • are logs/metrics/traces were mentioned?
  • did someone talk to the teammates?

2. Ask computer science basics

• Types of sorting

  • simple question to see compute science background

• Why do we need databases?

• What is the type in the language?

  • what is the difference between int and string?

• What data structures do we have and why?

  • Splay-tree is cool, but have you used it personally?
  • Don't ask something that goes far beyond regular development day.

3. Do not rush into documentation questions

• Don't ask all the implementation of IList in language XXX
  • are we interested in those who remembers everything
  • or those who can investigate the problem and find a solution?

Developer (aka middle developer)

0. TODO

1. How to keep code clean and usable?

• Linters, static analysis tool
• Code review
• Good abstractions
• ...

2. Implement a basic function (like len, map, filter so on)

• You will be amazed how many developers cannnot make it.
• Even with 3+ years of experience.
• Also a good question to switch to the editor and talk about it.

3. Why do we need indexes in databases?

• What type of indexes do we have?
• Pros and cons of them.
• and off course when we do not need them?

4. Ask about previous project in details

• What was the load?
• What about storage?
  • Is everything is fine?
  • Why exactly XXX?

5. Do not expect to see best code ever

• Candidate has a stress.
• Keep errors as something inevitable.
• Care to help after few minutes of stuck.

Senior developer

0. TODO

1. How to develop a new project?

2. How to build a team?

3. What problems you had on previous jobs?

• how to solve them?
• are you ok that this might appear here too?

4. System design

• How good candidates asks for the clarifications?
• How deeply it explains things?
• Pros and cons before selecting a tool.
• Trade offs.
• Maintain.

QA

TODO

DevOps/SRE

TODO

Team leader

TODO

Architect

TODO

Notes