In my last post I alluded to interview quizzers. These are [straw man alert] egotistical people who assume that any smart person must know the highly-specific information that they themselves have learned in the last month. "I don't know, but I'll google it and tell you in a few minutes," is what I would recommend saying to such a person. While there are also many really excellent guides out there that will help you become a good interviewer, I think there is one area in which all are lacking. Naturally, I am referring to completely askew interview questions.
We've all had interviews like this. Maybe the interviewees just don't know anything. Maybe they're biology majors that your boss scheduled for you because "their resume looked kind of interesting." Maybe they're Operations Research people interviewing for your programming job, and they made it through HR because "all engineers are the same." Maybe they have a year of experience, yet somehow six pages of bold acronyms ("HTML, DHTML, ASP, VB6, J2EE, XML" - I haven't seen one with AJAX yet but I'll let you know) and this successfully fooled someone upstream.
You could gripe and moan about getting some better resume screeners around here, dammit, or you could make the most of it. Once you've gotten the deer-in-the-headlights blank stare trying to work through an algorithm or write a C function, you still have the awkward remainder of the interview to worry about. You could waste time explaining the position or talking about their fraternity, or you could politely say you don't think things will work out (I've never had the heart to do this). There is a better way.
In an ideal world, all interviews are an uplifting experience. Even if the candidate isn't qualified, you still want them to walk away with something–a warm fuzzy feeling, perhaps. Personally, I try to apply my own philosophy of making everybody's day just a little more surreal.
To that end, I thought I would share two of my favorite questions for this purpose. The good thing about each of these is that they leave a slight (yet tangible) opening for a clever candidate to find redemption.
Where is November?
This is the great grandaddy of them all, when it comes to programmer interviews. This question is lifted from The Mythical Man Month, a classic of software writing. Fred Brooks explains that the point of this question is to determine whether or not the person thinks in three dimensions.
The idea that great programmers think in (at least) three dimensions is quite valid, if you ask me, but I'm not sure that all people capable of doing so make great programmers. The connection here is that 3D-thinkers will have a mental model of the calendar whether they realize as much or not. The smartest people will instinctively recognize what you're asking.
Anyway, the nice thing about this question is that it can be answered even if the candidate calls you a sociopath and storms out. If they motion with their hands as they parse the question, that is probably an unconscious answer.
There is no correct response. My "November" is located to the lower left. The calendar forms a very disproportionate ellipse with summer on the top and winter on the bottom. June, July, and August are overhead and roughly equivalent in length to November through May.
Name the Nine Planets
I really want to use this as a basic litmus test, but this is foiled by the fact that I know some very competent programmers who would not have answered it correctly. I really can't believe this–if you ask me, this is a trivia question only if "the sun revolves around the Earth, true or false" is a trivia question. It’s inconceivable to me that someone can know all of the words to Bird Dream of the Olympus Mons without caring where Olympus Mons is.
This question is deceptively open-ended. The candidate can get some major bonus points if they tell you that there are actually eight, ten, or eleven planets, you retard.
Disclaimer: this is mostly a humor piece, and I actually do make an attempt to keep things professional. So in other words, don't come crying to me if acting crazy gets you sued. This should not be attempted by amateurs.
