On 7/14/20 11:19 AM, Peter Kristolaitis wrote:
On 2020-07-14 1:55 p.m., Michael Thomas wrote:
But I try as much as possible to put candidates at ease because I
know that not everybody reacts to interviews the same, which is sadly
not the case far too often.
Mike
I often ask a question early in the interview to the effect of "Tell
me about a tech project you've worked on outside of your professional
work. It doesn't have to be related at all to this role or any other
professional role you've worked on, just something cool involving tech
that you've done on your own time."
I don't care if the answer is setting up a complicated home lab, or
programming Arduinos to make a robotic cat feeder, or 3D printing, or
whatever. I ask this question for two reasons: first, there is a
correlation between being passionate about technology and being good
at working with it and learning it professionally; and second,
talking about not-directly-related-to-the-resume stuff for a couple of
minutes often lets the "introvert geek" personality-types relax and
open up a lot. I find this is particularly helpful when hiring for
junior and intermediate roles, but I will sometimes ask it of senior
candidates too.
Oh, I like that one too and ask it often. It's sort of depressing how
often the answer is "i don't have time" or something to that effect.
I wrote a LIGO listener to monitor the cosmic kabooms as they were
detected just for fun and to learn Django. You have to be constantly
refreshing your skills and that habit is way more important than whether
you can code up algorithm XYZ or tell me how TCP slow start works.
Mike
