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- Candidate could not form coherent answers to my questions - Candidate was lacking in fundamentals in his/her domain - Candidate could not demonstrate a good

by Bahamut 12y ago

- Candidate could not form coherent answers to my questions - Candidate was lacking in fundamentals in his/her domain - Candidate could not demonstrate a good critical thinking ability The first was a total dealbreaker on a phone screen. I prefer strong critical thinkers, and am willing to eschew complete knowledge of a domain from a candidate and mentor him/her up to speed, but weak critical thinking is nearly a dealbreaker for me as a manager. I have been extraordinarily happy with all the people I have hired so far.

jtheory 12y ago
I agree about critical thinking, but how do you test it? I've seen signs of poor logic crop up just when going into detail about past experience; but otherwise it can be hard to see -- particularly when the candidate has been working on projects where someone else was providing technical leadership. I do ask candidates to go through a thought exercise -- basically a software dev related puzzle requiring no special knowledge (except a bit of basic crypto). Something like "here are the 5 constraints; walk through how these 3 scenarios would work" -- no code involved, but requiring the ability to convert constraints and goals into step-by-step instructions. This has been pretty useful (there's a surprisingly huge range in the types of responses I get) but wouldn't reveal much about how good someone's choices would be deciding how to implement new features from scratch, for example.
- Bahamut 12y ago
  I task candidates with problems, and then I ask questions as the candidate attempts to solve the problem to learn what the candidate is thinking, and how the candidate approaches the problem - solving the problem isn't important to me, but seeing how the candidate works is. I'll ask questions like "Why did you choose [insert data structure]?" or "Why didn't you approach this problem [insert way]?" or "Why did you approach this problem this way?", or even questions like "What would happen if you chose to do it [insert way]?" You also find out a lot about the person's knowledge as well. I don't necessarily expect perfection in code design - I can help teach that, but a good foundation is paramount.

by Bahamut 12y ago

jtheory 12y ago

I agree about critical thinking, but how do you test it? I've seen signs of poor logic crop up just when going into detail about past experience; but otherwise it can be hard to see -- particularly when the candidate has been working on projects where someone else was providing technical leadership. I do ask candidates to go through a thought exercise -- basically a software dev related puzzle requiring no special knowledge (except a bit of basic crypto). Something like "here are the 5 constraints; walk through how these 3 scenarios would work" -- no code involved, but requiring the ability to convert constraints and goals into step-by-step instructions. This has been pretty useful (there's a surprisingly huge range in the types of responses I get) but wouldn't reveal much about how good someone's choices would be deciding how to implement new features from scratch, for example.

Bahamut 12y ago
I task candidates with problems, and then I ask questions as the candidate attempts to solve the problem to learn what the candidate is thinking, and how the candidate approaches the problem - solving the problem isn't important to me, but seeing how the candidate works is. I'll ask questions like "Why did you choose [insert data structure]?" or "Why didn't you approach this problem [insert way]?" or "Why did you approach this problem this way?", or even questions like "What would happen if you chose to do it [insert way]?" You also find out a lot about the person's knowledge as well. I don't necessarily expect perfection in code design - I can help teach that, but a good foundation is paramount.