4 ms·

Thanks for this. As an individual contributor software developer I've been tasked to initially interview candidates for our software developer roles. I have no

Thanks for this. As an individual contributor software developer I've been tasked to initially interview candidates for our software developer roles. I have no prior experience in interviewing people, so my current strategy is to just ask about everything on the résumé, ask to see any source code written by the candidate, and ask technical trivia questions like "explain the http life cycle" and "explain the difference between filter, map, reduce (javascript)".

JonChesterfield 5y ago
Implement map in terms of reduce is probably a reasonable variant on that.
bluefirebrand 5y ago
Ask about team processes. Talk to them about how they approach code review and testing their code. If their resume includes overlap with your tech stack, ask if they understand why you would choose the tech you use, like "We use Y as a caching layer. What advantages does that give us over using Z instead". If they can't answer that's fine, but it helps you get an idea of their abilities. In the JavaScript world I like to ask if candidates can explain what benefits there are to using TypeScript. Yes it adds strong typing, but what does that get you. I definitely have a bias towards devs who can demonstrate that they have thought about the tools they use and why they use them. I also think it demonstrates that people have actually used the tools, without making them implement stuff from memory.
commandlinefan 5y ago
> "explain the http life cycle" and "explain the difference between filter, map, reduce (javascript)". Those seem like pretty reasonable questions, though - they're at least things that would have come up at some point if somebody had actually been doing professional (web) development.
dandigangi 5y ago
These are pretty good questions. I'd put more value on say understanding HTTP or async/promises and how they work vs knowing the differences between methods. You can always look those up. One interesting thing with reduce would be "What is a situation where reduce is the best choice?" What I look for is a bridge from the coding question earlier where most people will implement a nested loop situation and could bring down the total iterations over the data set.

JonChesterfield 5y ago

Implement map in terms of reduce is probably a reasonable variant on that.

bluefirebrand 5y ago

Ask about team processes. Talk to them about how they approach code review and testing their code. If their resume includes overlap with your tech stack, ask if they understand why you would choose the tech you use, like "We use Y as a caching layer. What advantages does that give us over using Z instead". If they can't answer that's fine, but it helps you get an idea of their abilities. In the JavaScript world I like to ask if candidates can explain what benefits there are to using TypeScript. Yes it adds strong typing, but what does that get you. I definitely have a bias towards devs who can demonstrate that they have thought about the tools they use and why they use them. I also think it demonstrates that people have actually used the tools, without making them implement stuff from memory.

commandlinefan 5y ago

> "explain the http life cycle" and "explain the difference between filter, map, reduce (javascript)". Those seem like pretty reasonable questions, though - they're at least things that would have come up at some point if somebody had actually been doing professional (web) development.

dandigangi 5y ago

These are pretty good questions. I'd put more value on say understanding HTTP or async/promises and how they work vs knowing the differences between methods. You can always look those up. One interesting thing with reduce would be "What is a situation where reduce is the best choice?" What I look for is a bridge from the coding question earlier where most people will implement a nested loop situation and could bring down the total iterations over the data set.