Posts filed under 'interview question'
Jurgen has The Perfect Job Interview Question. It’s
When reviewing somebody else’s code, what is it that you usually find most disturbing?
This is a good question. If someone doesn’t review code, you’ll hear that. Jurgen goes on to discuss the syntax answers vs. the design/architecture answers.
He has a point. I would add some more questions, such as:
- When was the last time you reviewed someone else’s code? I want to know how recent this experience is
- When have you been prohibited from reviewing code? … What were the circumstances?
- When did you fight to review code?
- Have you ever reviewed unit tests and code? (a closed question to understand the context) What did you do? (a behavior-description question to understand what actions the candidate took or didn’t)
There may be even more questions to learn more about how a candidate is accustomed to working, and how well that experience might fit for you.
I don’t think this is the one and only perfect interview question, even for developers. But it’s a good start.
April 25th, 2008
Bruce Eckel has a nice post, What Questions Would You Ask?, especially for developers. I really like the question about books :-)Here’s how I would expand on that for project managers and testers:
- How do we you make project decisions? Can you give me an example?
- What happens at the end of the project? or Do you ever have crunch time at the end of the project? What do you do?
- When was the last time you had a one-on-one with any of your staff (for a manager or project manager)?
- How do you do career development?
Got other favorite questions? Please comment.
September 29th, 2006
A few weeks ago at the “Hiring for an Agile Team” session, the group generated a number of behavior-description questions. I promised I would post them, so here they are:
- “Tell me about a time you made a mistake.”
- Using the context of shipping/releasing a product late: “What did you change?” (Notice the past tense of “did.” When interviewing for an agile team, the group expected that the candidate would take some initiative for change. And, by using the word “did,” the candidate is less likely to take this as a hypothetical question.)
- “Tell me about a time you/your team changed course.”
- “Tell me about a time you performed another role on a project.” (looking for people who are comfortable roaming around a team, doing what needs to be done.)
- “Tell me about a time you worked with people on their projects.” (Looking for people who can coach.)
- “Tell me about a time you made a difference.”
- “Tell me about a time your daily priorities changed.”
There were tons of other great questions. If you participated in that session (or even if not!) and you have some questions you have found have helped you looking for people to fit into an Agile team, please leave a comment here.
August 14th, 2006
I received some great comments on Why Puzzles and Riddles Discriminate. Adam has a terrific list of the things he’s looking for when he uses “puzzles and/or brainteasers and/or random programs to test”:
- Do they give up right off the bat?
- Do they ask questions or sit silent pondering?
- Do they make different attempts or approaches?
- What areas (if any) do they get stuck on?
- Can they explain what they are thinking? If yes - great. If no - what’s the reason?
And, Craig and Eric disagree with my original post. I may not be able to convince Craig and Eric, but let me use Adam’s list and explain how the answers might be different when the interviewer uses a puzzle/riddle vs. using an audition.In the interview, the context is key to seeing how a person succeeds at work. If the context of the interview is congruent with the workplace, the interview can be a reasonable representative of how the person will interact with people at work. But if the context of the interview is different from the work, the kinds of questions and auditions are less likely to be useful.
I was working with a hiring manager and the interviewing team recently who liked giving what they called “technical puzzles” to candidates. But they’d had several problems recently: two recent hires quit, and one candidate walked out in the middle of the interview. I asked what they were doing for these technical puzzles, and was told they had several–and all of them were about developing a recursive algorithm. The problem was these folks didn’t do any recursion at all. In fact, they had a huge data transformation application, so the context of the interview didn’t match the context of the job. Once new hires realized they’d made a mistake, they reactivated their job search and left. And one candidate didn’t bother waiting until the end of the interview. He’d flipped the bozo bit on the interviewing team.
At another client, the interviewing team liked word riddles. The team traded off who got to ask the puzzle/riddle question during the interview. (That team had 5 people, each of whom had a different puzzle/riddle.) Because the interviewing team were not great at asking behavior-description questions or using real auditions, they missed bunch of people who were hired by other managers in the company (the new hires were successful). I was able to talk to the new hires and ask them questions to understand what the interviewing team was missing. Several of the new hires misunderstood the logic puzzle because English wasn’t their first language, and they didn’t hear the puzzle correctly. Two of the new hires decided that if that’s how the team evaluated potential candidates, they didn’t want to work with that team. And one of the new hires had attempted to explain why there was more than one solution to the riddle, but the interviewer couldn’t hear that.You might say that this interviewing team was able to hire into their culture, and you’d be partly right 
But in contrast to their interview questions, this team actually had a culture of looking into a problem several ways, debating how to do things, prototyping to see what solutions could look like–a much more collaborative way of working than their puzzle/riddle questions probed. The interviewing team shortchanged themselves by not asking questions/doing auditions that reflected the way they actually worked.
You’ve probably noted I haven’t addressed the discrimination issue here. No one would talk to me about that, because they were afraid (both the new employees and the interviewing teams) that I would be forced to go to a lawyer if I had data that said they were discriminating. But I did notice that in my clients’ large North American cities, those clients who rely heavily on puzzles and riddles have primarily-white, primarily male staffs (this is in contrast to other organizations who have much more diversity). I understand about the problem attracting women to the field in general (see MusingsonWomenandIt. But I could not understand the lack of Asians and other people who aren’t white.Our choices of questions that are not directly related to the job (and no matter how you slice it, puzzles and riddles are only indirectly related to the job) reflect our culture. It’s quite clear that the puzzles and riddles interviewers choose reflect their individual culture. And without meaning to, that culture primarily selects for people just like themselves.I do want to ask questions or observe behaviors similar to Aaron’s questions. But I want to see them in the context of what people do at work, specifically work in this organization. So I want to make all my questions and auditions as context-sensitive as I can. I want to know that candidates will succeed here, in this context.
August 9th, 2006
At last week’s Agile 2006 conference, I led a tutorial called “Hiring for an Agile Team.” I made a statement that some of the participants challenged:
Using puzzles and riddles discriminate against anyone who isn’t a (middle-upper class) white American suburban male.
(I’d forgotten the middle-upper class part when I was leading the session.) So, what everyone wants to know is: Where is my data?
First, let me explain why I said this. (This post is a bit of a rant.)
- Girls, for example, do not have access or the alone time to spend doing books of puzzles and riddles. It is socially unacceptable for even the geekiest girl you know to do this. A girl who spends time pursuing puzzles and riddles for her own pleasure runs the colossal risk of being ostracized from all the other girls. Boys tend to discover puzzles and riddles during middle school and continue to pursue them through high school. Middle and high school for girls is much more about social ability and social connections.
- The people who can afford to buy the puzzle and riddle books (to practice them and become better at them) are middle-to-upper economic class.
- Puzzles and riddles appeal to a limited number of personality types–types frequently found in high-tech jobs. In particular, they appeal most often to NTs, especially INTJ and INTP types. (NTs are visionaries in Do Your Interview Questions Discriminate For or Against Your Needs?
So, the people who practice with puzzles and riddles are the people who have the disposable income, time, and social acceptability to do so. I don’t know enough about middle class high school boys from other cultures, but I see this all the time in the US.If you’d like to see some other information, take a look at How Would You Move Mount Fuji?. There are some hints at the articles at Career Resource Center but no reference. I also wrote Brainteaser Interviews Showcase Lack of Interviewer Skill, not Candidate Expertise. And, take a look at Brainteasers Inappropriate for Job Interviews by John Kador, who literally wrote the book.
So, have I convinced you yet? Maybe not. Maybe you still think you need a way to know if this candidate is smart enough for you, or you don’t feel competent to start a conversation with something like a puzzle or a riddle to dissect.If you need to know whether a person is smart enough, use behavior-description questions and auditions. Don’t be afraid to ask the “What did you learn from that experience” question as a follow up from your behavior-description questions. If you need people who are smarter than the people we normally have in our field, use the job analysis to understand why. (I bet you don’t, but that’s another rant.)If you need a conversation starter, I have some ideas on building rapport already in this blog, but I’ll write another piece about building rapport. Tongue-in-cheek: Really, if you’d been socializing in high school instead of using puzzles and riddles to avoid social interactions, you might already know how to do this.
Joel discusses ways to really interview in The Guerrilla Guide to Interviewing and he discusses auditions in The Perils of JavaSchools. So, if you’re looking for real discrimination data, sorry, I don’t have it. I only have my common sense.
Remember, the goal of an interview is to evaluate how well a candidate will do at work, specifically in your workplace. Puzzles and riddles may evaluate a certain kind of personality, and possibly even raw IQ. But they won’t tell you how well a candidate can work with your group or on your products. And that’s the point of an interview.
August 2nd, 2006
Hiring managers love the ‘Why did you leave your last job’ question. As an interviewer, too many people are willing to tell all, and those stories explain a lot about a candidate.Anthony in Been Fired Lately? says it’s not a big deal–everyone’s been fired. And for many candidates, I would agree. But here are things I’ve heard as a hiring manager:
- “Well, I didn’t like the work my boss gave me, so I stopped coming in.”
- “I had too much school work, so I stopped working.”
- “I didn’t agree with my boss.”
I like asking the question to see what kind of an answer I get, to see if it’s something I want to check in the interview or in the reference.
And for the record, I was fired twice and laid off once. The firings were called layoffs, but since I was the only one laid off, I’m pretty sure I was fired. I have not had to fire myself yet
January 18th, 2006
I always thought it was easier to ask senior managers and senior technical staff questions, because they had so much experience. But especially with managers, much of their experience is about judgement calls and the way they make decisions. So, I’d ask about that. But from some questions I’ve received recently, I’m in the minority of enjoying interviewing senior staff. Here are examples of questions I’ve asked in the past:
- Give me an example of a time you had to choose between two alternatives you didn’t like. What did you do? (I’m looking for someone to say they didn’t limit themselves to two options. Or if they did, I’m looking for how they made the decision.)
- Has there been a time you felt your ethics were challenged by something your management wanted you to do? What happened? (Anyone who’s been in a senior position or has been working at mid- and upper-management levels for any amount of time has been in a position like this. I want to see them admit it, and say what they did.)
- Have you ever been in a position to provide feedback to an employee who wasn’t working out? What did you do?
- Have you ever had to fire someone? What were the circumstances? What did you do?
- Have you been in a position to coach or mentor someone? What did you do? When do you choose to take on coaching or mentoring? (These questions work for managers and senior technical people alike.)
Asking senior people behavior-description questions provides you a way to have a conversation about real experiences, and to see if the circumstances around those experiences are relevant to your context.
January 13th, 2006
The Alito hearings this week made me cringe. If you watched or heard any of them, you saw senators orating, leading, and in general asking ridiculous questions (both sides). Why didn’t anyone ask either of these two sets of questions:
- Have you been in a position to have to rule against the executive branch? What did you do? What factors influenced your judgement?
- As a judge, have you been in a position to rule on Roe v. Wade? What happened in that case?
Why didn’t the senators ask these questions? Alito is a smart enough guy to know that his personal opinions are not supposed to matter, and that he doesn’t have to supply his personal opinions. But he should have been willing to discuss his judicial responses to the facts of a case.
Back to hiring technical people and managers in the next post.
January 13th, 2006
I led a very short interviewing class when I was in Israel, mostly teaching project management. One of my classes wanted a few tips on how to interview more successfully. I asked them what they were doing now, and they claimed to be asking behavior-description questions and using auditions. Those techniques should work, so I asked for example questions and auditions.
Turns out they were using logic puzzles instead of real auditions. I’m not sure I convinced them logic puzzles are not at all similar to the problem solving people perform at work.But I was able to make some headway on their question types. Many folks were asking questions of the type, “How would you…” instead of “How did you” or “Tell me about a time you did…” We practiced a bit so they could feel the difference in question type.
Hypothetical questions can be useful. But they’re not as useful as behavior-description questions for seeing how people have worked at work. With care, you can turn any question from a hypothetical (How would you) to a behavior-description question (How did you).
December 27th, 2005
I saw this gem of advice: ask for a candidate to explain his/her most significant accomplishment when sending a resume. (Found on Recruiting.com.) This is a great screening device (better than technical tests, in my opinion).
Candidates, this means you need to be thinking about your significant accomplishments (work-related please, unless you can make a real case for a non-work related accomplishment) and be able to write about them.
Hiring managers, you can use this as a screening device. If a candidate doesn’t include a paragraph, you don’t have to read the resume. Make sure your resume intake system allows you to grab the paragraph as well as the resume.
December 9th, 2005
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