
What to Ask a Programmer in a Job Interview - johnnyb_61820
https://mindmatters.ai/2020/02/what-to-ask-a-programmer-in-a-job-interview/
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Not going to pull any punches here: these are some of the softest, most
useless interview questions I've ever come across.

> "What's your favourite language? Why?" "How many languages do you know?"

You need to be a software engineer to interpret the answers to these in
anything like a useful way, but if you're an engineer _you already realise
that these are dumb questions_. If you're not an engineer, the answers are
meaningless: if candidate X says she knows 4 languages, and candidate Y says
he knows 5, is Y better than X? Candidate Z can talk your ear off about Rust,
Go, and Haskell -- is she a good fit for your frontend team?

Technical interviewers ask technical questions ("quick, reverse this linked
list"). Non-technical interviewers ask non-technical questions ("quick, how do
you deal with conflict"). Blending the two just results in a waste of time for
everyone involved.

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johnnyb_61820
Favorite language and why is the question that I use to separate out actual
programmers from pretenders. Reversing a linked list is a useless question,
because very few people even think in those terms anymore. That's more of a
"when did you start programming" question than an actual skill question now.
But your favorite language and why allows you to see if they have actually
thought about what they are doing, or if they are just code monkeys. Getting
them to compare and contrast means that they have understood the multiple
languages, and can comment on them intelligibly. I don't care if you know 2 or
6. I care if it is >1 and if you know them sufficiently well to know where
they are strong and where they are weak. You can also tell if they are just
parroting things they have read or if this comes from a place of personal
experience - you can ask followups like "where have you run into this problem"
or "what project did this help out".

Asking about linked lists will literally just tell you if they have a CS
degree, when they graduated, and if they did the right practice interview
questions. It generally won't tell you anything about how they will actually
do when you get them on the team.

