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Conducting interviews  |  (2007/11/16 13:50)

I haven't interviewed anyone in a long time, but I had a thought today. The next time I do one, I'm not going to ask any coding questions or logic problems. Instead I'm going to ask a series of questions like: VI or emacs? How do you prefer to arrange your source repository and what SCM do you prefer? Python or Ruby or? Favorite programming font? Tabs vs spaces? Braces on the end of the line or on a new line and how do you indent? And follow those up with an open ended why? If they can give an decent answer, the content will probably be irrelevant, or something that you've already heard, but the more I talk to bad developers, the more I realize how little they care about the environment in which they program. In contrast, the more I talk to really good developers (and the closer I approach that status) the more I see how much attention they pay to the smallest things in their environment and how that increases their productivity. They care about the code they are writing and they do the maximum to make it easy to focus on that code. They have an opinion on the interminable debates such as vi vs emacs and bsd vs linux. It doesn't matter whether we agree on editor choice because as long as they had a reasonable answer to why, they're more likely to churn out decent code than the guy who can whiteboard a quicksort. (Though it's known as the One True Brace Style for a reason...)

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