alt Hacker NewsI mostly skipped the technical questions in the last few interviews I have conducted. I have a conversation, ask them about their career, about job changes, about hobbies, what they do after work. If you know the subject, skilled people talk a certain way, whether it is IT, construction, sailing.
I do rely on HR having, hopefully, done their job and validated the work history.
I do have one technical question that started out as fun and quirky but has actually shown more value than expected. I call it the desert island cli.
What are your 5 linux cli desert island commands?
Having a hardware background, today, mine are: vi, lsof, netcat, glances, and I am blanking on a fifth. We have been doing a lot of terraform lately
I have had several interesting responses
Manager level candidate with 15+ years hands on experience. He thought it was a dumb question because it would never happen. He became the teams manager a few months after hiring. He was a great manager and we are friends.
Manager level to replace the dumb question manager. His were all Mac terminal eye candy. He did not get the job.
Senior level SRE hire with a software background. He only needed two emacs and a compiler, he could write anything else he needed.
Replies
I have an ice breaker type question which is “what’s something (tool, tech, whatever) you are interested/excited about and wish people knew more about?” Selfishly, interviewing is kind of boring, so I’m always looking to learn something new.
Sadly, out of 100s of people, I’ve probably only gotten an interesting response a handful of times. Mostly people say some well known tech from the job description.
I never held that against anyone, but the people who had an interest in something were more fun to work with.
>I mostly skipped the technical questions in the last few interviews I have conducted. I have a conversation
Sir, you have attained dizzying intellectual heights that few men have.
My comment is meant to be a compliment, not snarky. And indeed I have noticed that the best people I have encountered can often size people up accurately with very general questions often on unrelated subjects.
Do you have network access? I would pick ssh.
> What are your 5 linux cli desert island commands?
Are you familiar with busybox ?
> Manager level to replace the dumb question manager. His were all Mac terminal eye candy. He did not get the job
Huh? Please explain
> I have a conversation, ask them about their career, about job changes, about hobbies, what they do after work. If you know the subject, skilled people talk a certain way, whether it is IT, construction, sailing.
My experience differs a lot. Many insanely skilled people are somewhat "weird" (including possibly
- being a little on the spectrum,
- "living a little bit in their own world",
- having opinions on topics that are politically "inappropriate" (not in the sense of "being on the 'wrong' side of a political fence", but rather in the sense of "an opinion that is quite different than what you have ever heard in your own bubble", and is thus not "socially accepted")
- being a little bit "obnoxious" (not in bad sense, but in a sense that might annoy a particular kind of people))
What you consider to be "skilled people" is what I would rather call "skilled self-promoters" (or possibly "smooth talker"). "Skilled people" and "skilled self-promoter" are quite different breeds of people.