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Ask HN: good interview questions?

4 points by jdavid ↗ HN
What are good interview questions?

I have been asking questions about features in different languages that a developer or hacker might like. I think it does 2 things, 1. i get to know their style and what they favor in a language, and 2. i get to hear them talk about a language intelligently.

I think more than not I like looking to see if someone is willing and capable of mastering a language than asking them to perform a specific task.

I also asked someone if they could quickly draw a class hierarchy for a car and a driver. I am just wondering if that is too easy, or too hard.

I have been interviewed by a number of companies and it seems that the ones that will have you operating more independently ask easier questions.

So what do you all think.

PS. i have another interview to give at 3:30pm today so i might use some of these tips.

4 comments

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noodle
its really your call on what you value most and whats involved in the job. for what you say you value, your questions sound like they'd do the trick.

you might want to throw in some critical thinking type of questions, just to see what happens.

alnayyir
Class hierarchy is vague, do you mean a class:object sort of thing or something else entirely? Specify, don't use meaningless words like hierarchy. It's academic fluff, and this is coming from a philosopher.

Reapply what I've said here to everything else. It sounds like you know what you're doing, especially as regards, "talking about the language intelligently". That means you're way ahead of the curve in hiring already.

tweaqslug
I find that I can quickly get a feel for a candidate's general reasoning ability through a game of 20 questions.
bprater
I really liked the post the other day where they handed the interviewee a chunk of code and asked them to "make it better".