6 ms·
How do you interview someone more experienced than yourself? In the last set of interviews I had to do, I've ended up doing the role of talking to people about
by GlennS 9y ago
How do you interview someone more experienced than yourself?
In the last set of interviews I had to do, I've ended up doing the role of talking to people about the technologies listed on their CV and asking them detailed questions to find out just how well they really know them. This just because I happened to be the person in our company who knew a little bit about most of the things that the people we were interviewing claimed to be good at.
Sometimes you have a really nice technical conversation with them and discover that they're clever and knowledgable. Sometimes you uncover a blagger trying their luck. Sometimes a bit of both. So, it's a useful part of the interview I think.
So very recently we interviewed someone with 30+ years of experience, more than any programmer at our company (only 3 developers), and much more than myself (8 years).
So I went away and did a little bit of research about the technologies he'd talked about: COM and Corba and JBoss and other artefacts 80s and 90s, and tried to ask some questions in as respectful a way as I good, and I hope he wasn't too annoyed. In the end he was great (actually I found his enthusiasm and attention to detail pretty inspiring) and we hired him.
I can definitely see how a person would be annoyed by that sort of probing though, especially when the interviewer doesn't know what they're talking about.
But, what's the alternative?
- mempko 9y agoThe alternative is for our field to have a strong organization that vets it's members, like any other professional field such as lawyers and other engineering disciplines. That way, before you even meet the person, you can assume a level of competence and can get into much deeper questions faster.
- ThePawnBreak 9y agoAnd then all the high-paying jobs will go to people who went to MIT and Stanford, and if you're great but couldn't afford more than community college, tough luck, because your credential is the same as other people who barely finished high school.
- s17n 9y agoI think that would probably already happen if it weren't for the fact that there are more high paying jobs then there are MIT/Stanford/etc grads.
- itronitron 9y agoI guess the irony is that most of the interview tactics now focus simply on comparing candidate A to candidate B, in contrast to learning about candidate A or learning about candidate B and evaluating their suitability based on their skills and experience. If you ask both candidates a question like "Johnny climbed up to the top of the hill, where was Johnny when he stopped climbing?" and then get a blank stare from both candidates then you are going to conclude that you can't find any 'qualified' candidates because they can't answer a dead-simple question. The vetting of candidates used to be contributions to software product releases and publications (in addition to degrees and GPA). A motivated hiring manager could also search mail archives of popular open-source projects.
- psyc 9y agoIt doesn't sound to me like you did anything wrong. I think what I have in mind is more subtle than just asking questions. I don't have any objection to being asked questions in general. I would prefer you ask questions appropriate to the claims I'm making about myself - that is, I'll feel more insulted if you ask more than a couple of remedial questions. You may suspect I'm a fraud, but beware of communicating to me that you suspect I'm a fraud.