I mostly skipped the technical questions in the last few interviews I have conducted. I have a conversation, ask them about their career, about job changes, about hobbies, what they do after work. If you know the subject, skilled people talk a certain way, whether it is IT, construction, sailing.
I do rely on HR having, hopefully, done their job and validated the work history.
I do have one technical question that started out as fun and quirky but has actually shown more value than expected. I call it the desert island cli.
What are your 5 linux cli desert island commands?
Having a hardware background, today, mine are: vi, lsof, netcat, glances, and I am blanking on a fifth. We have been doing a lot of terraform lately
I have had several interesting responses
Manager level candidate with 15+ years hands on experience. He thought it was a dumb question because it would never happen. He became the teams manager a few months after hiring. He was a great manager and we are friends.
Manager level to replace the dumb question manager. His were all Mac terminal eye candy. He did not get the job.
Senior level SRE hire with a software background. He only needed two emacs and a compiler, he could write anything else he needed.
> I have a conversation, ask them about their career, about job changes, about hobbies, what they do after work. If you know the subject, skilled people talk a certain way, whether it is IT, construction, sailing.
My experience differs a lot. Many insanely skilled people are somewhat "weird" (including possibly
- being a little on the spectrum,
- "living a little bit in their own world",
- having opinions on topics that are politically "inappropriate" (not in the sense of "being on the 'wrong' side of a political fence", but rather in the sense of "an opinion that is quite different than what you have ever heard in your own bubble", and is thus not "socially accepted")
- being a little bit "obnoxious" (not in bad sense, but in a sense that might annoy a particular kind of people))
What you consider to be "skilled people" is what I would rather call "skilled self-promoters" (or possibly "smooth talker"). "Skilled people" and "skilled self-promoter" are quite different breeds of people.
> My experience differs a lot. Many insanely skilled people are somewhat "weird" (including possibly
I am actually a bit weird myself, so I can relate.
> What you consider to be "skilled people" is what I would rather call "skilled self-promoters". "Skilled people" and "skilled self-promoter" are quite different breeds of people.
I don't mean that they have told me that they are skilled, or that their resume has implied it. I mean that they actually have the skills. Self-promoters that don't know the information always look good on paper, but after a few minutes of talking to them you can tell that they don't quite match.
Before IT, I was a live sound engineer TV, theater, music. There was also a entertainment university starting up around the same time. They were pumping out tons of "trained" engineers that looked good on paper but couldn't mix for shit. I think we can blame them for the shitification of pop music.
> Self-promoters that don't know the information always look good on paper, but after a few minutes of talking to them you can tell that they don't quite match.
My experience differs here: these are not "good self-promoters", but impostors.
Good self-promoters typically have some above-average (though commonly not really exceptional) skills in their area, but their expertise is in the capability of smooth talking (including smalltalk), promoting their contributions, and talking at eye level with various stakeholders.
If you are really exceptional in your area, you will often (though not always) consider smalltalk to be waste of your time, and will often have difficulties talking at eye level with various stakeholders, because either they are not sufficiently knowledgable in your area of expertise to understand you, or the other way round (for the latter point: becoming really great in one area often means that you won't have the time to get sufficiently deep into a lot of other areas, even though for some of them you might become quite skilled if you had more time).
>I mostly skipped the technical questions in the last few interviews I have conducted. I have a conversation
Sir, you have attained dizzying intellectual heights that few men have.
My comment is meant to be a compliment, not snarky. And indeed I have noticed that the best people I have encountered can often size people up accurately with very general questions often on unrelated subjects.
I have an ice breaker type question which is “what’s something (tool, tech, whatever) you are interested/excited about and wish people knew more about?” Selfishly, interviewing is kind of boring, so I’m always looking to learn something new.
Sadly, out of 100s of people, I’ve probably only gotten an interesting response a handful of times. Mostly people say some well known tech from the job description.
I never held that against anyone, but the people who had an interest in something were more fun to work with.
We hired the guy who said it was a dump question, he became our manager. He then decided to retire and we had to replace him. One of the candidates answered the 5 cli question with terminal eye candy, not functional commands. He was not hired for the job.
Yeah that’s what you said. I was asking you to explain.
It seems ridiculous to classify any terminal command as “eye candy” and what’s the point of asking the question if you want to hire someone that finds it stupid?
They have very few buttons, which you can't tell apart in the dark (unless you remember the layout) and everything must be done through the UI which tries to upsell you some streaming service everywhere.
In the 90s domain registration was all handled through email. You emailed from an approved address, with a specific format, to change anything about the registration. This included where your name servers were.
Made self-hosting interesting when your home IP changed, or you moved, and that was where you hosted your DNS and email.
We get our eggs from a specialty butcher, their meat prices are rather high. Their organic, locally sourced eggs are a good $4 cheaper than the big box groceries regular eggs.
