An interview with Will Storey, Software Architect | InDevs, Volume 1, Issue 2

Narsimham Chelluri
Nov 1 · 2 min read

Oooh, interview questions will be a big topic for me.

I would love to know what your philosophies on interviewing candidates are. Did you read Dave Rolsky’s post on hiring that someone posted a few months back?

And Will’s responses:

Yeah, I read it at the time and just looked at it again. I think he gets things pretty right.

I dislike whiteboard and brainteaser type interviews too. I think homework problems are reasonable if they aren’t crazy long. They can be abused easily, like asking a candidate to do them before the company invests much time in them, e.g. as a screen, so I get why people don’t like them. But they seem the best of bad options to me.

I’m sceptical of the idea of pair programming in an interview. I haven’t done that on either side, but like whiteboarding it doesn’t seem very realistic to be thrown into that situation. I guess the way I look at it is if it’s something I couldn’t do well myself, then it’s probably not a great way to measure someone else.

Probably the biggest thing is to not waste people’s time. A friend of mine is interviewing right now, and one company put him through 8 interviews and a week of free work for them. They told him no on the 8th interview. Totally crazy. And they aren’t even a big name company. Another has given him a math test and now a programming test.

I’d like to think that at most a couple interviews, with a homework in between, should be sufficient to make a decision. At my last job I was involved in hiring and that’s basically what I did.

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