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Ask HN: How Do You Interview Tech Leads / Engineering Managers?

4 points by aalhour ↗ HN
When interviewing a Tech Lead or an Engineering Manager for a team in your company, what practices do you employ? What are the themes of your interview? What characteristics do you look for? How do you know if the candidate is good at managing people, time and resources?

3 comments

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JamesBarney
The first steps is deciding what type of person you want to hire.

Do you want somebody with strong technical chops who's going to lead white boarding sessions and mentor candidates?

Do you want someone with strong people management skills, who is going to make sure that everyone who has a meeting with them feels good?

Do you want someone with strong project management skills, where all of the important stakeholders are going to get a nice looking report every two weeks?

These are all people who would do well or poorly in those positions depending on the company.

aalhour
I like your concise answer. What would you ask candidates in the second and third category in order to be sure that they are qualified for the job, since skills like managing people and projects are not as concrete as writing code? Would you give them an on-site task to work on?
JamesBarney
I'd rely on a referral network, and ask them situational questions.

A bunch of "Given this scenario what would you do?" questions.

Ask them what's important in a progress report to give to clients. How they think about it, ask for other reports.

And people management I think if you find someone that seems empathic they'll probably be good at managing people.

Also ask them questions about how to help with retention etc...