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Ask HN: Designing interview questions

2 points by probinso ↗ HN
I find designing good in person interview challenges non-trivial. It is hard to know, until it is too late if your question is appropriate. Many challenges have I come up with have clever solutions, that bias my expectations.

What process do you go through to develop appropriate challenges for interviews? (I'm especially interested with in person challenges)

3 comments

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dozzie
You don't. You ask your candidates about what they have done in the past and let them talk. You don't want puzzle solvers, you want people who can do concrete, useful things. If you want to check if the candidate knows about a particular area, you just ask him/her about it and then dig a little deeper. Of course you must know the area yourself, otherwise the judgement won't work appropriately.
probinso
Do you find that you are able to get sufficient information when limiting your material to the candidate's domain?
dozzie
Why do you think you can't ask candidate about what you need in this interview mode? Sure you can. Just don't expect he (let's stick with this pronoun) will know very much -- it's not his domain, he didn't work with that.

What you get out of hearing the candidate talk about his past project(s) is the knowledge how he approached problems and if he actually completed anything worthwhile, even if it was internals refactoring and there was no thing visible outside.