I’ve been reflecting on the concept of “seniority” this afternoon. I’ve realized that one big thing I look for when I’m looking to hire someone “senior” is someone who has made consequential technical decisions, and then had to live the consequences of those decisions.
I’ve also realized that I don’t have questions that get right at this in my interview bank. Something to develop!
@jacob I’ve also started looking for discussions where a candidate can ask questions of me. The way someone tries to build context can give some indicators of seniority.
However, it’s tricky because of the power dynamic in an interview can skew things.
@matt_g agreed. I'll sometimes set up questions where I want the candidate to dig for extra context -- and I'll outright tell them "I haven't given you all the info, please ask me questions until you have what you need for an answer."
I like this the most when I'm interviewing for a leadership position: I'll describe some problem the team/organization is having right now and ask the candidate to start trying to diagnose the issue and think about possible fixes with me.
@jacob Yeah I've been doing this for years. For sr I like to talk about things they did where they hung around long enough to be the bad guy.
It's a great signal when it's there but not everybody gets those kinds of opportunities. (It's a strong positive but not necessarily a negative if missing, depends on the job history.)
@jacob It could be also a situation when someone need to make a suboptimal technical decision and then never being able to go back and fix or spend more time on studying the problem.
@jacob They are a little uninventive, but I have had good success with "tell me about a time you made a wrong decision" as well as "tell me about a time when you and another technical leader/executive clashed". I'm mostly looking for people to own up to their mistakes, highlight process or cultural issues that can magnify issues, and have some thoughtful discussion on how everyone is imperfect and that dev processes must account for that.
@andrew@jacob I always have trouble with those questions « tell me about a time where you ». I feel my mind is absolutely not organized this way and it’s very hard for me to conjure a specific memory based on these very generic kinds of prompts, even though I usually have had those experiences. Also, it usually tells more about what the interviewee think they would react (or how they think they should say they would react) than how they would actually react.
@andrew@jacob I think I find « if we had a debate on x vs y, what side would you pick, how would you convince me. What do you think may go wrong with this, how may you react » to lead to more interesting discussions. And the door is always open to the candidate saying « well that actually happened to me 2 years ago and… »
@ewjoachim@andrew I think a lot about people who struggle with behavioral questions, and how to make sure my process doesn't just select for people who are good at interview questions.
@ewjoachim@andrew Like Andrew, I try to account for different "styles" by sharing the questions ahead of time so folks can prepare and bring notes/talking points if they want. And I've also found that I can generally get to the data I'm looking for with the right kind of guiding questions ("then what happened?" "oh yeah, how'd that go?" "why do you think that happened?").
But yeah, it's hard. Interviewing isn't anything close to an exact science.
@jacob Yeah, they're usually my lead in to find out stuff like that, but also a rather unfortunate number of people jump jobs so often that they've never been there to find out after they fucked around, and I'm not sure what to make of people in that situation.
@jacob I like to ask people questions with no correct answer. "How should the interface between these parts of the business work? What are signals of health in this interface which you've seen? What are antipatterns/failure modes?"
Leaks a ton of signal about not only experience but also ability to communicate it. Seniority is not just about "getting it" but about ability to then help others get it. ESPECIALLY when the thing is messy and nuanced
@jacob excellent line of inquiry in an interview, especially for senior engineers and director+ candidates. I’ve used a version of “tell me about a time that you’ve championed a position against resistance, and later determined that it was the wrong path” numerous times. What’s very telling is if a candidate can’t come up with an example.
@jacob yeah, sorry, it was a train of thought for me where I left out the middle step, which is: writing a post-mortem of a system they designed and how it fared over time could be interesting.
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