The “9 Real World Questions” article was of course meant for humor value, but I definitely have some thoughts on the state of interviewing engineers these days. Your article touches upon some good points.

The point about hiring not based on past results, but rather on future needs reminds me of something I see a lot of hiring teams do (and I’ve been guilty of myself). The team will have recently encountered some vexing problem, and after much time and effort will have come up with some solution. Thereafter, interviewees are presented with that same problem — and are expected to come up with the same solution in the course of half an hour.

But I really like your point “Figure out what problem you are hiring someone to solve.” At my previous gigs, we directors all ready Josh Tyler’s “Building Great Software Engineering Teams”. In that book, he covers an approach he took with his engineers… he basically asked them to come up with the qualities they were looking for in an engineer. After going through the exercise, the qualities were mostly things like “eager to learn”, “able to teach me something”, “not a jerk”, “good attitude”, etc. There wasn’t much along the lines of “able to reverse a linked list” or anything like that.

So we went through a similar exercise… in our case, we went back through our Slack channels in which we’d discussed candidates that had come in to interview. And we looked at all of the reasons candidates were given thumbs up or thumbs down. And we saw very similar results. So we started adjusting our questions accordingly… still assessing their tech skills, of course, but also focusing on their ability/willingness to learn something, to teach something, etc.

Anyway, I think the industry in general has a ways to go… ;)