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Ask HN: Programmer Compatibility Questions

1 points by psadri ↗ HN
Dating services like eharmony base their matches on responses to compatibility questions.

Can you think of non technical questions that would help predict if you’d get along with someone on a team? Examples:

- tabs or spaces? (Tabs, spaces, I doesn’t matter as long as we are consistent)

- what’s the largest diff you feel comfortable sending for a code review? (30 lines, 100 lines, 1000 lines)

- Do you refactor code without first discussing it with the person who wrote it?

etc...

3 comments

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treeman79
Servers need to be manually rebooted multi times per day. It’s getting worse.

Your task is to add a todo calendar to the website by Monday.

What advise do you give?

schmookeeg
Hmmm... Programmers all share different flavors of common hells that seem to originate in HR or non-technical management -- you can do better than multiple-choice and yes/no questions and improve your dataset at the same time.

Ask them to:

Describe their worst interview

Complain about recruiters

Describe their worst cubicle-mate

Craft the perfect daily scrum session

Describe the dumbest flavor-of-the-week woke matchmaking attempt, "team building", personality quiz, or psychological assessment they've suffered

==

Tease out the answers and see if you can derive commonality with your culture that way. :)

runawaybottle
Show them some bad code and pray they recognize it and have similar feedback as you.

It’s as simple as that, you really can’t know their taste any other way.