Good Tech Interviews

What is HTML All The Things?

HTML All The Things is a web development podcast and discord community which was started by Matt and Mike, developers based in Ontario, Canada.

The podcast speaks to web development topics as well as running a small business, self-employment and time management. You can join them for both their successes and their struggles as they try to manage expanding their Web Development business without stretching themselves too thin.

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What's This One About?

Tech interviews can be good, bad, or...really bad. Some of them take multiple interviews to complete, others involve hours of homework, and the worst of them include all the above. In this episode, Matt and Mike discuss tech interviews and how to make them better. The duo cover the good, the bad, and the ugly via a collection of horror stories, followed by some good practices for both the interviewer and interviewee.

Show Notes

Interview Horror Stories

Asking questions about unrelated tech
Tons of interview rounds
White board coding
Massive take home tasks
No call backs
Leetcode for junior FE dev position

Some good experiences/practices

What is a good experience for one person might not be for someone else. We are all different but it’s still important to point out what some people have had positive reactions too.

Questions being real problems that can be expected to be solved on the job
Allowing you to make mistakes
- Correcting those mistakes and seeing how you accept correction, and guidance
- “We don’t care about the result but how someone tries to solve the problem, how they handle being stuck and how they handle help. This can sometimes say more about a person then being right”
Conversations about previous projects
- Letting you lead the interviewer through your code and explaining your reasoning
- Talk about tech you chose and why
- Talk about your passion side projects
Lean more on culture fit rather then just technical
- Conversational interview
  - Find the kind of stuff they are passionate about and how they go about exploring the passion (doesn’t have to be specifically tech)
- Allow the probation period to determine if you are a technical fit
No real technical interviews due to your blog, network, github (reputation)

After reading all these here is how I’d conduct an interview now

Before the interview I will let the interviewee know all the tech that would be required for the job and also to make sure they have some projects/code available to look at on git
- No surprises and gives them a chance to get familiar
Basic get to know them questions
- “Give me a bit of background info on yourself”
Tell me about some of the projects you’ve worked on
Take the answers from there and dive deeper into the tech they talked about
Ask them to bring up some code they wrote for one of those projects and walk me through it
- Question them on some of the choices (see how they handle constructive questioning/feedback)
Ask them to describe their troubleshooting process
- Mainly looking for the steps they take to get to a solution
- Ideally Documentation, google and ask for help
Ask them what they’d expect out of the job
Tell them about our expectations (hours, vacation, etc)
Ask them for their questions