January 23, 2014 at 14:54Perfect IT interview
- Tutorial
“Dad, does a perfect job interview exist?”
- No, son, this is fantastic.
(c)
Ideal interviews, unlike gophers, are almost never found in the wild IT environment. But the desire for the best should not die out, so we offer you some tips on how to conduct a perfect interview.
I think everyone will agree that the interview for the position of a junior developer and top manager should be different. But you need to dance not from the position, but from the goals that you set for the future employee.
This is where the first catch lies. Companies like to say that they only need the best people. But in reality, very often they take not the best , but suitableaccording to certain criteria (not always related to quality) invented by the company, or, even worse, born in the head of the eychar itself. As a result of such activities, the company does not employ the best specialists, but employees selected according to some template.
Let's see what you need to ask and what to look for when interviewing IT people of various professional levels. In each case, I will talk about the average job seeker, and not about the genius, which many of you naturally are.
Junior Developer aka Junior
The task of a junior developer is to quickly learn and learn from experience. Doing small work on projects is one of the ways to learn, and not the reason you should hire him. The task of the company is to make middle out of junior for the shortest possible time (ideally for 2-2.5 years).
* Many companies may be tempted to recruit juniors to sell them as middle. Selling juniors at the price of middle, of course, is profitable, but it is much more profitable to sell middle at the price of two seniors.
In order to understand how quickly a junior can learn and develop, ask at an interview what he did three years ago, two years ago, a year ago (even if he was at university at that time). Ask what books he is reading now, what films he is watching and what he is studying at the moment. Look at the progress. If nothing has changed dramatically in work, hobby, literature and cinema over the past year or two, then most likely, at such an unhurried pace, he will “work” for you.
Want to ask what algorithms he knows? You can do this, but you must understand that without practice, any knowledge of the algorithms will mean that he most likely learned them. It is better to ask about his term paper or thesis. A person who really wants to learn and develop, at this moment will be transformed and begin to talk very enthusiastically and more at ease about hisuseless work. But for an enthusiastic person, this “craft” is the most important project in the world.
If he begins to tell that the university did not give anything, nothing interesting happened to him in five years - this is an alarming bell. Since IT, by and large, is not a talk show where you are the main character, but the usual routine of raking legacy code and writing bicycles. It is likely that with the same enthusiasm he will do your work.
It is pointless to ask who the junior sees himself after 5 years. He will agree to work in the first company, which will not mind taking it and giving some money for a new sweater.
* Not so long ago there was a new category of “joons” who, having read on the forums about the high salaries of IT people, begin to ask (even, we would say, insistently demand) stopping a hundred money and a masseuse in addition to the opportunity to see His Majesty, slowly laying out solitaire from the operators and classes, two to three hours in between trips to the university and nightclubs. You can ask such people when and where the nearest class party is planned and ... say goodbye. Although, in fairness, we add that this virus is seen not only among young professionals.
Developer aka middle
The middle-developer is your pack horse, which will carry out most of all routine work and bring maximum profit. Therefore, for the middle, it is important to be a “hard worker” and not a “star” or a “cool dude”. Keep in mind that among the middles, the most unrecognized table tennis champions.
At the interview, it is necessary to place great emphasis on the availability of certain knowledge and skills (it is possible without going deeper into theoretical jungle). The more technical questions you ask and the more correct answers you get, the better for you. Be sure to ask how the abstract class differs from the interface - as practice shows, it is very easy to identify real middle notes with this question.
Middle competency area - programming languages, tools and technologies. Therefore, the more technical questions and tasks the applicant passes, the better.
Here we will make a remark on how best to conduct technical interviews. The first way - we’ll not even comment on “writing code on paper” - we need to burn such interviewers at the stake (hello, Microsoft and all its imitators). About the second method - to make a mini-project, on which you need to kill at least half, usually a working day, also forget.
So, the algorithm is as follows: if the applicant is a speaker, an active and well-known person, you can watch videos of performances on YouTube, presentations on slideshare, projects on github, codeplex and / or read his questions / answers on stackoverflow. If this does not help or the information is missing, then you will probably want to give a test task. It is better to send it by mail without specifying a deadline for completion. Speed of execution, enthusiasm, quality of execution, correspondence and other things will tell you almost everything about this candidate.
* But if the applicant did not respond to your vacancy, and it was you who invited him for an interview or recommended it to you, you must do everything to minimize the time spent by the applicant on you. And yes, if you harassed him for two months so that he would come for an interview, do not ask him questions a la “why do you want to work in our company”. The answer will surprise and upset you :) It
is pointless to ask who the middle sees itself in five years. Five years later, he is unlikely to work in your company.
Senior developer aka “
senior ” The problem with senior developers is that such a specialist can perform various roles - technical lead, team lead, interviewer, training specialist, etc. As a rule, these roles are combined to one degree or another.
A senior developer is a person who can do the weekly work of his team in one day. If you do not bother him. But he will not do this, because he is a senior developer, which means that he will most likely conduct interviews, fill out matrices for his team members, drink coffee, attend his body (but not his soul) at numerous rallies, and also sow inside the companycommunism scrum.
The task of the interviewer is to determine before the interview who the company wants to see: a technical specialist (emphasis on technology) or team leader (emphasis on management).
If you need a technical specialist, then you need to ask him about the domain areas in which he worked, previous projects, his real role, the level of complexity of the projects and the size / composition of teams. The technical senor’s area of competence is the individual components of the system and their integration, good knowledge of third-party tools (frameworks, ready-made solutions, CMS and specific libraries). Do not ask him questions about the syntax of the language - some constructions, he most likely already forgot, and some never came in handy in his life. Or be prepared for the fact that, instead of deciding, he will express his willingness to beat his fingers off to anyone who writes something like this in a real project.
If you need a team lead, then the questions should concern not technologies, programming languages, but read books on managing people and projects, aspects of conflict resolution. Make sure that the speech of the applicant looks confident. You can simulate some life situations (but without fanaticism) and propose to solve them. But you need to be prepared that its methods and methods will be different from yours. Timlid's area of competence is the ability to be convincing, to understand at least a little of psychology and management, as well as technology at the level of tools (jira, tfs, asana, etc.).
It must be remembered that there are very few technicians who are both strong specialists and good team leaders. If you come across just that - do not scare away and do everything possible to get it.
Professional aka “guru”
A guru is a person who, in a critical situation, can pull a project on himself or take a hit. In ordinary life, they can be arrogant, difficult to manipulate and wanta lot of money.
The guru should not be proud of the number of projects made or the money earned, but the maximum level of tasks and problems that he solved.
What to ask the guru? This is a difficult question, since the guru, as a rule, has vast experience in interviewing, so HR will outsmart at almost all levels. Perhaps the most correct way out is when a guru is interviewed by another guru or someone from top management. The guru will understand the technical level, the top manager will most likely determine how much a person will suit the company. As a rule, if a person is a guru, then everyone knows this and in this case there should not be any complicated interviews.
Instead of conclusions
If you are looking for specialists up to the level of team lead or technical lead, then the interview should be built on the basis of the position and your requirements (in large companies this task is best assigned to a recruiting agency), if higher - based on the person and his future role (here you need to connect personal connections and networking). And the higher the position you need to close, the more individual the approach should be. All this is due to the fact that the IT sphere is very different from other areas, so traditional cases, stressful and other types of interviews will not work. After all, the middle can be a junior in one company and a senior in another.
Have a nice interview!
- No, son, this is fantastic.
(c)
Ideal interviews, unlike gophers, are almost never found in the wild IT environment. But the desire for the best should not die out, so we offer you some tips on how to conduct a perfect interview.
I think everyone will agree that the interview for the position of a junior developer and top manager should be different. But you need to dance not from the position, but from the goals that you set for the future employee.
This is where the first catch lies. Companies like to say that they only need the best people. But in reality, very often they take not the best , but suitableaccording to certain criteria (not always related to quality) invented by the company, or, even worse, born in the head of the eychar itself. As a result of such activities, the company does not employ the best specialists, but employees selected according to some template.
Let's see what you need to ask and what to look for when interviewing IT people of various professional levels. In each case, I will talk about the average job seeker, and not about the genius, which many of you naturally are.
Junior Developer aka Junior
The task of a junior developer is to quickly learn and learn from experience. Doing small work on projects is one of the ways to learn, and not the reason you should hire him. The task of the company is to make middle out of junior for the shortest possible time (ideally for 2-2.5 years).
* Many companies may be tempted to recruit juniors to sell them as middle. Selling juniors at the price of middle, of course, is profitable, but it is much more profitable to sell middle at the price of two seniors.
In order to understand how quickly a junior can learn and develop, ask at an interview what he did three years ago, two years ago, a year ago (even if he was at university at that time). Ask what books he is reading now, what films he is watching and what he is studying at the moment. Look at the progress. If nothing has changed dramatically in work, hobby, literature and cinema over the past year or two, then most likely, at such an unhurried pace, he will “work” for you.
Want to ask what algorithms he knows? You can do this, but you must understand that without practice, any knowledge of the algorithms will mean that he most likely learned them. It is better to ask about his term paper or thesis. A person who really wants to learn and develop, at this moment will be transformed and begin to talk very enthusiastically and more at ease about his
If he begins to tell that the university did not give anything, nothing interesting happened to him in five years - this is an alarming bell. Since IT, by and large, is not a talk show where you are the main character, but the usual routine of raking legacy code and writing bicycles. It is likely that with the same enthusiasm he will do your work.
It is pointless to ask who the junior sees himself after 5 years. He will agree to work in the first company, which will not mind taking it and giving some money for a new sweater.
* Not so long ago there was a new category of “joons” who, having read on the forums about the high salaries of IT people, begin to ask (even, we would say, insistently demand) stopping a hundred money and a masseuse in addition to the opportunity to see His Majesty, slowly laying out solitaire from the operators and classes, two to three hours in between trips to the university and nightclubs. You can ask such people when and where the nearest class party is planned and ... say goodbye. Although, in fairness, we add that this virus is seen not only among young professionals.
Developer aka middle
The middle-developer is your pack horse, which will carry out most of all routine work and bring maximum profit. Therefore, for the middle, it is important to be a “hard worker” and not a “star” or a “cool dude”. Keep in mind that among the middles, the most unrecognized table tennis champions.
At the interview, it is necessary to place great emphasis on the availability of certain knowledge and skills (it is possible without going deeper into theoretical jungle). The more technical questions you ask and the more correct answers you get, the better for you. Be sure to ask how the abstract class differs from the interface - as practice shows, it is very easy to identify real middle notes with this question.
Middle competency area - programming languages, tools and technologies. Therefore, the more technical questions and tasks the applicant passes, the better.
Here we will make a remark on how best to conduct technical interviews. The first way - we’ll not even comment on “writing code on paper” - we need to burn such interviewers at the stake (hello, Microsoft and all its imitators). About the second method - to make a mini-project, on which you need to kill at least half, usually a working day, also forget.
So, the algorithm is as follows: if the applicant is a speaker, an active and well-known person, you can watch videos of performances on YouTube, presentations on slideshare, projects on github, codeplex and / or read his questions / answers on stackoverflow. If this does not help or the information is missing, then you will probably want to give a test task. It is better to send it by mail without specifying a deadline for completion. Speed of execution, enthusiasm, quality of execution, correspondence and other things will tell you almost everything about this candidate.
* But if the applicant did not respond to your vacancy, and it was you who invited him for an interview or recommended it to you, you must do everything to minimize the time spent by the applicant on you. And yes, if you harassed him for two months so that he would come for an interview, do not ask him questions a la “why do you want to work in our company”. The answer will surprise and upset you :) It
is pointless to ask who the middle sees itself in five years. Five years later, he is unlikely to work in your company.
Senior developer aka “
senior ” The problem with senior developers is that such a specialist can perform various roles - technical lead, team lead, interviewer, training specialist, etc. As a rule, these roles are combined to one degree or another.
A senior developer is a person who can do the weekly work of his team in one day. If you do not bother him. But he will not do this, because he is a senior developer, which means that he will most likely conduct interviews, fill out matrices for his team members, drink coffee, attend his body (but not his soul) at numerous rallies, and also sow inside the company
The task of the interviewer is to determine before the interview who the company wants to see: a technical specialist (emphasis on technology) or team leader (emphasis on management).
If you need a technical specialist, then you need to ask him about the domain areas in which he worked, previous projects, his real role, the level of complexity of the projects and the size / composition of teams. The technical senor’s area of competence is the individual components of the system and their integration, good knowledge of third-party tools (frameworks, ready-made solutions, CMS and specific libraries). Do not ask him questions about the syntax of the language - some constructions, he most likely already forgot, and some never came in handy in his life. Or be prepared for the fact that, instead of deciding, he will express his willingness to beat his fingers off to anyone who writes something like this in a real project.
If you need a team lead, then the questions should concern not technologies, programming languages, but read books on managing people and projects, aspects of conflict resolution. Make sure that the speech of the applicant looks confident. You can simulate some life situations (but without fanaticism) and propose to solve them. But you need to be prepared that its methods and methods will be different from yours. Timlid's area of competence is the ability to be convincing, to understand at least a little of psychology and management, as well as technology at the level of tools (jira, tfs, asana, etc.).
It must be remembered that there are very few technicians who are both strong specialists and good team leaders. If you come across just that - do not scare away and do everything possible to get it.
Professional aka “guru”
A guru is a person who, in a critical situation, can pull a project on himself or take a hit. In ordinary life, they can be arrogant, difficult to manipulate and want
The guru should not be proud of the number of projects made or the money earned, but the maximum level of tasks and problems that he solved.
What to ask the guru? This is a difficult question, since the guru, as a rule, has vast experience in interviewing, so HR will outsmart at almost all levels. Perhaps the most correct way out is when a guru is interviewed by another guru or someone from top management. The guru will understand the technical level, the top manager will most likely determine how much a person will suit the company. As a rule, if a person is a guru, then everyone knows this and in this case there should not be any complicated interviews.
Instead of conclusions
If you are looking for specialists up to the level of team lead or technical lead, then the interview should be built on the basis of the position and your requirements (in large companies this task is best assigned to a recruiting agency), if higher - based on the person and his future role (here you need to connect personal connections and networking). And the higher the position you need to close, the more individual the approach should be. All this is due to the fact that the IT sphere is very different from other areas, so traditional cases, stressful and other types of interviews will not work. After all, the middle can be a junior in one company and a senior in another.
Have a nice interview!