Interviewing Developers: triggers, part III

The series:
Interviewing Developers
Interviewing Developers: triggers, part I
Interviewing Developers: triggers, part II
Interviewing Developers: triggers, part III

This post also appears in my other blog.

In the two previous posts I focused on certain behaviors of an interviewee, which may indicate problems with their ability to become a good developer in my team. I covered quite a lot of such aspects that push me towards saying "no" and now it's time to show that I can be positive as well. Positive triggers also help conduct an interview, although rarely shorten it, because they make you eager to speak more to the person. In this post I will list some things that make a good impression on an interviewer, explaining why they are good and thus showing what I look for in potential hires.

Candidate: "If you're interested, I'd like to explain the broader context of my previous job / project / task"

Just basic politeness and showing awareness of the fact that the interviewer may have their own plan and time limits change a lot. However, combined with a person' willingness to share his or her specific past experience it is even more powerful. In many cases an interviewer has to spend a lot of energy to get a reasonable picture of the candidate's background and has few options other than squeezing the bits of information out of the person, so one who offers a clear explanation themselves makes a head start. This positive impression may be further amplified with occasional dives into technical details - for example, down to a brief explanation of a class hierarchy - because this likely indicates both an ability to communicate efficiently and a desire to dig into things and understand them. Finally, note the initiative - sometimes it might be the most important aspect of a future employee - it means they have ideas and fuel to make them happen and your organization will only have to stir them in the right direction.

Candidate: "So we stick that thing into that stuff and …"

This one may sound unprofessional and stupid, but trust me, an ability to explain complex technical constructs using the simplest common language terms (yes, I qualify "stuff" for a term) usually indicates that the person does understand the solution being explained very deeply. Of course, whether you understand what they are telling or not makes a lot of difference and I speak only of the case when that explanation is comprehensible. If it is, you will likely find that it is easy to discuss both the edge cases of the same problem and similar but less familiar issues with the developer. That happens because a person using less formal terms in their speech has already internalized the knowledge being communicated - not just remembered some bits about it - and can play with his or her mental model to adjust and adapt it for other scenarios. This trait of a powerful mind is something that you would terribly like your teammates - especially, developers - to have.

Candidate: "Polymorphism is <reasonable explanation>. Imagine we have a base class called Person…"

Bless the people who provide examples for abstract ideas without being asked directly! Examples help every party involved in communication understand the topic better and spot new questions and ideas. While this merely makes the task of answering an interview question easier to do right, the real value is that the person shows that they are able to see the implications of an idea and view it from different angles. A developer who quickly comes up with examples and tries to view a problem or idea in concrete figures usually thinks realistically and understands the context better. Such a person quickly grasps the real world problems that a piece of software tries to fix and can transfer this understanding to their colleagues. As for an interview, they try to make it easier for you through their usage of examples and this alone deserves some respect.

Candidate: "We were using ASP MVC 2, which is kind of old, so I decided to learn Node.js and built a personal web-site / game / whatever with it"

Here I barely need to explain anything: desire to learn and develop on one's own is what makes great professionals. They also don't blame their boss or organization for not giving them an opportunity to learn new things or work with the hottest new technologies - they simply learn whatever they find appropriate when they feel a desire to do so. On the other side, any developer may occasionally get a bit tired with their day job and issues associated with it. A person with a positive attitude feeling their own responsibility for their growth will be able to help themselves through such uneasiness by means of a personal project. It is true that such a side activity may distract someone from their job, but the stakes are high it would rather improve the way the developer attends to their duty giving them extra energy and ability to bring new ideas from the outside world.

This is far from an extensive list of positive interview triggers and there are dozens of things that will make an interviewer like a candidate. Still, I will stop right here, because the things said are enough to give a good indication of what I value when sitting on the hiring side. I must have highlighted this a thousand times, but any hiring decision is based on a lot of factors and no single one of the triggers that I mention should be treated as a basis for yes or no. Still if you have a collection of such triggers in mind they may help a lot navigating you through the process of acquiring a new team member.

An interview is about finding a great person to close a gap in your team, so it is important to note both positive and negative edges of the candidate's personality. The goal is to check whether the candidate is a good fit for the open position, the team and your company's culture - that's why I pay that much attention to the communication abilities and personal traits. Of course, the most important purpose of the interviewing process is to avoid hiring the wrong person - hence the relatively large number of negative triggers in the previous posts versus few positive ones in this one. At the same time, noticing the good aspects is also important - especially when these show that after being hired the candidate will keep growing professionally, help others and improve the way they and their new team do the job.

In conclusion of this short series I wish you good interviews - on both sides of the process - and welcome you to share the bits that help you learn more from them!

Inerviewing Developers: triggers, part II

The series:
Interviewing Developers
Interviewing Developers: triggers, part I
Interviewing Developers: triggers, part II
Interviewing Developers: triggers, part III

This post also appears in my other blog.

Last time we looked into several responses that I don’t like to hear during an interview. In this post I will add more examples of candidates’ phrases, which usually indicate weak potential for becoming a worthy team member. Next time, to finish on a good note, I will switch to positive interview triggers, but today let’s keep a bit negative.

Candidate: “I’m tired of writing code. I want to be an architect in your team.”

The funniest thing about this is that I usually hear it from 23–24 years old guys, who have at most a couple years of commercial development experience. It is clear that a candidate with this kind of background is hardly fit for a software architect’s position, but it is also difficult to consider them as a developer because they admit they don’t want to do programming anymore. What’s worse, I believe there are few (if any) good architects who don’t wish they could spend more time coding. Somehow the love for programming comes together with good software design skills and the lack of it means one can’t go far on the technical side of the software development world. The simplest rule here is: never hire for a knowledge-based position someone who doesn’t like its core — they will likely be both inefficient and dissatisfied.

Candidate: “That wasn’t my responsibility”

Usually this comes in response to questions like “Why did your team chose to implement X and not Y?” and “Why did you use that framework instead of this one?” If we speak of junior and mid-level developers we indeed must assume that someone else was in charge of making both product and technical decisions, but it is also true that good developers usually care enough about their work and team. This means they do question the decisions made by the team or the company and try to understand the reasoning behind them instead of blindly doing what they are told. It is also common for them to say “we” about the team — even after they left it — and assume some responsibility for its results. If a person does otherwise, it may indicate a lack of curiosity and ambition, both of which are crucial to becoming an effective team-player and growing one’s skills with time.
Candidate: “I was good but the other developer made incorrect decisions and so we failed”
This one is a refined version of unwillingness to take any responsibility — particularly, for failures. I bet, when asked about the reasons behind one of their successful projects that same person will claim full credit for that success. The problem is that such a person is likely a poor team-player. Clearly separating oneself from their team instead of saying “we” tells a lot about the person’s ability to make the team more effective, collaborate and help others. I definitely don’t want to hire someone who will do poor job and then blame the whole world in their failure — such people learn little, don’t work very hard and thus rarely succeed. Moreover, blaming others doesn’t make you look reliable and trustworthy — even outside the interviews.

Interviewer: “Which of your recent achievements make you feel proud?”
Candidate: “There wasn’t anything like that — just common work.”

While treating this response in a strictly negative way might feel too much, it is nevertheless very informative. Even with purely routine work a good employee will discover a way to optimize his day-to-day duties and will feel proud of doing so. The same way, even people who truly believe that they are inferior to others and the results of their work are flawed will likely find something to be proud of if they are willing to assess their achievements. Conversely, candidate’s inability to identify something worthy among their results means they are unprofessional, because a professional always reflects on what they do, looks for ways to improve that and definitely has a thing or two to name as their valuable accomplishments. You don’t want to deal with someone who shows little initiative and lacks a purpose, do you?

In these two posts I tried to outline possible characteristics of a person I wouldn’t want to hire. Like I said before, neither of the triggers mentioned in this or previous post can make me reject the candidate — they only give me a hint on what to look for and which skills and aspects of personality to analyze. It helps spend less time on interviews and also allows me to maintain a clearer understanding of the traits that I expect and don’t expect from the great developers, QA engineers and analysts we are looking for. I promise to return with a more positive attitude in the next post and review the behaviors that make candidates look good to me.