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Want to know the secret to interview developers? Here are the only 3 questions you have to ask: 1. What do you do for fun when not at work? … dig into to quest

• Ancalagon 4y ago
  I like questions 2 and 3 but question 1 seems like a subtle dig at the candidate to see if they spend most of their time outside of work coding.
  • dqh 4y ago
    For the same level of commercial experience, someone who spends most of their time outside work coding has more experience coding than someone who doesn't, and they probably love it. I think these things are worth knowing about a candidate when hiring?
    • Cheezewheel 4y ago
      That is awfully close to just discriminating against candidates who have families or especially single parents. This level of gatekeeping that a programmer who decides to have a full life outside of work is inherently an inferior programmer is a really superficial way to look at it. Equation passion with "Is this person willing and able to spend 60 hours a week coding" is a disgusting attitude that should just completely end in this industry. In my entire career the single most talented Programmer I ever knew was a single mother who logged off the computer every day after 8 hours period, and choose to spent her life with her kids.
      • Jensson 4y ago
        What you are saying is the same thing as "a programmer with 5 years of experience can be much better than one with 10", which is true, but does that mean that we shouldn't consider how much experience someone has? Nobody said that more is always better, just that it isn't worthless information.
      • vba616 4y ago
        People who want to have families often split the difference. One partner gets a government job that doesn't pay very much, but has great benefits, job security, and work/life balance, and the other takes a more demanding job with longer hours that pays better.
      • dqh 4y ago
        All else being equal, people get better at things they do more of, and part of the interview process is finding out how much coding a person has done. I'm sure that mother would give amazing answers to the other parts of this interview.
    • tomrod 4y ago
      Alternatively, they could be terrible coders and looking to improve outside of work, whereas the question gleans no substantial information for those that don't code outside of work.
      • 4y ago
  • haswell 4y ago
    I’ve asked question 1 many times when interviewing candidates, and it’s fine if someone comes back and says they don’t code much outside of work. I’m not expecting the answer to be “I spend my free time coding”, and it’s certainly never a subtle dig. But if that is their answer, it’s also a gateway to a more natural and relaxed conversation about the tech they care about and what makes them tick. I’ll often learn far more about a person that way than the typical “tell me about a project/time when…” style questions.
  • tcmart14 4y ago
    I can see that being an issue, I guess it depends on how the question is asked. My current job, I was asked a variation of this question, it was, "What do you do outside of work other than coding?" Followed up with a, "we are curious as to how you turn off work." However, my employer is also big on not wanting us to burn out at slinging code. Maybe it would be more appropriate to word it like that? Maybe not?
    • Ancalagon 4y ago
      Yes I think that would be much more appropriate!
• giantg2 4y ago
  That's sounds like a great interview that I'd probably pass. But I'm a terrible developer.
  • marktani 4y ago
    what's your answer to 2? I feel it's hard to fake convincing answers to these kind of "getting things done in the real world" questions.
    • bawolff 4y ago
      What is the interviewer supposed to hone in on for that? Like if i was to answer that honestly, it was fixing an obscure i18n bug for an underserved language group. I felt it was cool because it was such a small amount of work but made some people inordinately happy. In many ways i am much more proud of this 20 min bug fix than all the big technical projects i've done. But if you asked me any technical questions about it, the answer would almost entirely be - i used the architecture that already existed, because i was fixing a bug not rewriting the code base.
      • dqh 4y ago
        > What is the coolest thing you ever built? Fixing a bug isn't the same as building something, though.
    • giantg2 4y ago
      I have a couple of basic android apps and a site in Angular. One of my android apps had a few interesting problem. They would probably easy for experienced people, but they were hard for me when I was just learning. One the issues wouldn't even be applicable since we can use fragments today.
      • sarchertech 4y ago
        If you’re interviewing for a junior position that would be fine. If you’re interviewing for something higher level that answer would definitely raise some red flags. The point is to see if the experience you claim matches what you have actually done.
• mshake2 4y ago
  I love this style of interviewing, but I have been discouraged by HR/management from asking questions like these because they were deemed too subjective. Personally I believe this was directly related to their D&I pipeline efforts and the "subconscious bias" we were told we all had.
  • pokstad 4y ago
    100%, the future of tech hiring needs to be more data based and less “this is my kind of person” based. This is why prestigious companies have hiring committees and have well honed processes.
    • sarchertech 4y ago
      Prestigious companies have hiring committees and tons of hoops to jump through because they are optimizing for the lowest number of false positives. They can do this because their prestige ensures a near limitless supply of candidates willing to jump through those hoops.
    • switchbak 4y ago
      I strongly disagree based on my experience. I've worked at a place that had a very honed process for (supposedly) removing bias in interviews. At the end of the day we just pretended to removed bias, I'm not even sure that's possible with human beings. People hear what they hear, and you can't control for the layer of projection and filtering one will do during an interview. At it's best we tended to reject too many great candidates because our rubrics were so rigid, and it didn't let us make room for folks that were clearly amazing but didn't answer the questions in just the right way. Seriously, the talent we passed over was truly world class. There's a lot to be said for all of the non-verbal and subtle information that's conveyed in an interview. I think that throwing that all away is foolish because you're not really doing much better at removing the bias anyway.
    • Alex3917 4y ago
      > This is why prestigious companies have hiring committees and have well honed processes. Wouldn't it make more sense to consider the fastest growing companies, or perhaps the subset of fast growing companies with the most profit per employee?
• bawolff 4y ago
  I feel like q 1 and 2 would select against people who like to keep their personal and work life separate.
• Rebelgecko 4y ago
  I ask a question kinda similar to 1 sometimes when I interview people. Even when their answer isn't software related (for me it's more fun when that's the case but I try not to be biased), there's a lot of room to dig in deeper. Like if someone says their goal in life is to make the best tasting sourdough, ask them how they go about doing that. Researching new recipes? Starting with a base recipe they like and making small tweaks? Optimizing for their own taste preferences vs the tastes of the people they share it with? Etc. Even if their hobby isn't collecting Github stars, you can still learn a bit about their mindset. Plus I've found that getting someone to talk about something they're passionate about for 5 minutes is a good icebreaker to start an interview.
• yongjik 4y ago
  > 1. What do you do for fun when not at work? … dig into to questions from here. Sorry but I think it's a bad question. What if the answer is "Oh I don't have much spare time these days, I make dinner for our toddler son and put him to bed. My lesbian partner can't help much because she's expecting in a month." It's a trap leading to unwanted information - many of which would be downright illegal if factored into hiring decisions. There's a reason why all the big companies emphasize never to ask anything about nationality, ethnicity, marital status, religion, blah blah. You don't need to know, you don't want to know.
  • malux85 4y ago
    I would handle it like this : Oh, congratulations!!! Do you know the sex of the baby yet? What an exciting time, I bet you have lots of preparation going on. I also have a child and (blah blah bit of history) So we ask this question to get a bit of an idea about the candidates hobbies which tells us about them as a person, - are you outdoorsy or indoorsy? Are you a movie buff or a reader, or a rock climber or a painter or a poet? Or something even more interesting?! before you were so busy, how would you spend your non-work time? That way: Puts them at ease, shows you have empathy for their situation, find common ground, explain the reasoning for the question, gently nudge the conversation towards what we were looking for. It’s not rocket science people it’s just conversation skills.
    • icelancer 4y ago
      >> Do you know the sex of the baby yet? What the hell man, are you speedrunning the ability to get sued / posterized on Twitter?
    • galoisscobi 4y ago
      That’s going into the territory of protected classes and can backfire (depending on where you work). My approach is that if a candidate brings up any info related to a protected category is to not engage in it and move the interview along.
    • Kranar 4y ago
      For anyone else reading this, do not ever get into a conversation about family during an interview. That is just straight up making yourself a target for engaging in discriminatory hiring practices.
• fishtoaster 4y ago
  This sounds like a recipe for an incredibly inconsistent interview process. I know engineers love open, discussion-y interviews and senior interviewers like giving them, but the evidence just doesn't bare it out. "Work sample tests" and "Structured Interviews" are the most predictive of on-the-job success from the published research I've seen. No matter how much I'd prefer to have a freewheeling conversation as you describe, I have to bow to the evidence.
• dylan604 4y ago
  > It’s not bait them into talking about coding outside of work. I've been to work for companies that say anything you build while employed at company belongs to them unless you go through the proper channels and layers of red tape to discuss the projects with them to ensure that anything you are working on does not involve any company IP. This could sound like baiting for a different direction than the other comments are alluding.
  • tomrod 4y ago
    Indeed. I think the idea of the question is sound, but it's sufficient to ask "what drives you?" and dig in there.
• Alex3917 4y ago
  This. All the best places I have worked at in my career have basically followed this formula. And in fact these questions are fairly similar to the original YC application, with the exception that the question about your favorite tech stack was separate from the question about the coolest thing you've built. In contrast, the places that have done tech interviews have generally been awful to work at. Less intelligent people, less interesting work, worse management, etc.
• deleted 4y ago
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• catiopatio 4y ago
  #1 is a terrible question, and totally inappropriate. My time outside of work and what I do for fun isn’t your concern, and I don’t want to share those details with you.
• Roark66 4y ago
  Many below gave various reasons about it being less than ideal to ask "personal" questions about hobbies etc, but I think I have had such question asked of me during every interview. It never was at the beginning, usually after we've done talking about technical stuff and before the money conversation. Personally I never had a problem with it and from the interviewer point of view it helps lighten the atmosphere a bit talking about out of work stuff.
• tmaly 4y ago
  I always start by asking the candidate to tell me about themselves. They often go on and on about work. Then I say "Now tell me about yourself". Maybe your first question might work to get more at that idea.
• Longlius 4y ago
  #3 is one I've had to think on a lot recently and I think it comes down to two things: 1) When the person who wrote the code is no longer available to talk to. Having even a 5-10 minute chat can massively speed up my comprehension of someone else's code and save a lot of time. 2) Unused code that hasn't been deleted. I think everyone should strive to clean up their codebases. I'm not exactly blame-free here either so it's something I try to apply more and more as the codebases I work on start staying around for longer.