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It's not about whats broken, its about what you DO when it is broken. This my favorite interview question to ask candidates: "What is your all time biggest sc

It's not about whats broken, its about what you DO when it is broken. This my favorite interview question to ask candidates: "What is your all time biggest screw up, and how did you come back from it" - I then tell them the story of me loosing several hundred thousand dollars and the funny things that happened around it to set the tone. If you have been in tech for any length of time you have one of these stories (if not a few). I have heard some great ones by simply asking and it gives great insight into a candidate (humor, stress response, the things you have seen).

ataturk 9y ago
Don't fool yourself--I've been working almost 20 years as a developer and have worked on some major platforms (billions of dollars in revenue) and in healthcare with millions of lives at stake if I screw up and I have no stories about "losing several hundred thousand dollars." I have had a few small screw-ups like breaking a build over a weekend and plenty of bugs and other issues, but no not ever anything on the magnitude of what you are talking about. I'm not tooting my own horn here, either. I just never know what to say to those interview questions. I usually just look quizzically at the person and then don't get the job because they think I'm lying or something. On the other hand, I have had to clean up some major screw-ups that I inherited from other, less careful developers. I have saved at least one company millions of dollars in annual cost that were being wasted (still waiting for ANY recognition for that one). One place I worked was being charged for blank pages scanned and all my team and I did was come up with a way to avoid scanning those blank pages by not needing to use them as a physical delimiter. That process change saved $100K a year in cost. Some asswipe of a developer that came before me caused that and both didn't care and didn't even know what they did wrong, probably.

ataturk 9y ago

Don't fool yourself--I've been working almost 20 years as a developer and have worked on some major platforms (billions of dollars in revenue) and in healthcare with millions of lives at stake if I screw up and I have no stories about "losing several hundred thousand dollars." I have had a few small screw-ups like breaking a build over a weekend and plenty of bugs and other issues, but no not ever anything on the magnitude of what you are talking about. I'm not tooting my own horn here, either. I just never know what to say to those interview questions. I usually just look quizzically at the person and then don't get the job because they think I'm lying or something. On the other hand, I have had to clean up some major screw-ups that I inherited from other, less careful developers. I have saved at least one company millions of dollars in annual cost that were being wasted (still waiting for ANY recognition for that one). One place I worked was being charged for blank pages scanned and all my team and I did was come up with a way to avoid scanning those blank pages by not needing to use them as a physical delimiter. That process change saved $100K a year in cost. Some asswipe of a developer that came before me caused that and both didn't care and didn't even know what they did wrong, probably.