What not to ask for technical interviews

Never demand from the applicant esoteric knowledge in any particular technology. There is absolutely no connection between such knowledge and how effectively a person will work in your team.

The idea of ​​this post came to my mind when I came across an article entitled “ Questions for an interview for the position of Front-end developer ”. The incredibly long list given in the article - these are the questions that should never be asked. Never ever.

To ask these things at the interview means to instill to the applicant, “I’m a real maniac and for a week googled all this meaningless garbage only to make fun of you and see how you are suffering.”

Yes, I understand perfectly. We are all geeks, and we seriously believe that those around you should know and love exactly the stack of technologies that we know ourselves, and no other. But the fact that the applicant somehow miraculously finds himself in the head of knowledge, exactly the same as our hidden expectations, does not say anything about him.
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Think for a second about the best team you've ever worked with. And now remember a couple of the most disgusting assholes, which you had the pleasure to know personally. Do you consider only the level of technical qualifications when giving them such an assessment? Of course not.

Some of the most talented people with whom I had to work, behaved like complete assholes, and I would gladly have torn my head off with my own hands, without feeling the slightest remorse of conscience. On the other hand, some of my employees did not grab stars from the sky in terms of understanding the nuances of this or that technology, but I would not hesitate to agree again to work with them in a team.

I was lucky one day working with great people at DaVita. Of course, everyone had their strengths and weaknesses. [...] So, when I needed to conduct an interview, I asked only five simple technical questions - I do not need to terrorize a person for hours to understand whether he has experience or not.

If the interviewee responded adequately, I tried to start a dialogue with him using the following three questions:

- Why do you want to work with us?
- What do you think your personal quality will be most useful in teamwork?
- What do you really like to do?

As you can see, these questions are completely irrelevant to the short-term knowledge that the applicant could feverishly google an hour before the interview. If we have already found out that the candidate for the position possesses the minimum necessary skills, we need only to determine that he:

- Able to think critically;
- In love with some occupation;
- Will benefit in the team.

And the bottom line is that I don’t find software development complicated. In the network you can find a whole bunch of stuff, just enough to be able to use the search. If you can extract information from man pages and Stack Overflow, congratulations, you're a programmer.

This is not the problem. A software developer needs first of all a certain mindset. Attention to detail. Readiness for the fact that the debugging of the simplest code sometimes turns into a journey of eternity. The ability to concentrate on the task for hours.

Not many people fit this description. And those who are not suitable, but still work in the industry, it is easy to identify. Twenty minutes is enough to talk on any topic, except for technical details.

The note of my translator: I rarely publish translations, so I ask those who do not find it difficult to comment on the quality of the text. Thank!