Articles about Interviewing
I’m currently boning up on interview lore in preparation for one I’ve got coming up in a few weeks (speaking of which, if you’ll be in Munich on the 13th, drop me a line; First beer’s on me!). I’m ignoring the “big name” interview advice sites today (though techinterview looks like a promising avenue for tomorrow…), instead using the magic of NetNewsWire to dive back through my RSS feeds to find articles and essays that were written by people I read and respect. A little research has yielded the following (very) short list of interview essays that I think are worth reading, whether you’re prepping for an interview, or trying to figure out how to interview:
Steve Yegge has a number of excellent essays up, recounting his experiences interviewing candidates for software developer positions at Amazon. The best of these is “Five Essential Phone Screen Questions”, which outlines in great detail the critical areas to check for as early as possible in the interview process. It’s well written, and seems dead-on in terms of the areas it recommends.
He’s also written “Practical Magic”, exploring the question of abstraction (which is directly applicable to the danger of over-reliance on frameworks and JavaScript libraries); “What You Need To Know”, espousing the virtues of interviewing for ‘common sense’; and more recently “Interviewing Ruby Programmers” and it’s followup “The Truth About Interviewing”, arguing (among other things) that programming is hard, and that interviewees shouldn’t be surprised or offended when companies’ interview process sets a very high standard for acceptance.
And really, Steve’s blog and his collection of older essays are well worth reading no matter what you’re looking for, he’s an entertaining and insightful guy.
[Edited 2006-09-28: Steve moved servers and didn’t set up 301 redirects, so I updated the links manually.]
Joel Spolsky (of Joel on Software fame) has an essay up entitled “The Guerrilla Guide to Interviewing”, which is both a great example of why I enjoy reading Joel’s writing, but also a wonderful resource for technical interviews. Though this essay is geared towards the interviewer, his advice and expectations are easily applicable to the interviewee. He covers much of the same ground as Steve’s essays, though of course with his own spin, and offers some great tidbits about what he’s looking for, and what he finds impressive.
His essay “Getting Your Résumé Read” looks like a keeper as well, though it wasn’t exactly what I was looking for.
Do you know of any good articles I should add to the list?
Comments
It’s a little on the other side of the fence for you; but the post at 37signals the other day had some great thoughts about asking open questions which don’t “taint” the answer. It might be usefull to read through as it’s how a good interviewer will phrase questions.
http://37signals.com/svn/archives2/john_sawatsky_and_the_power_of_simple_questions.php
Posted By: Jehiah 4. September 2006, 06:04