Productivity

How to interview [memo]

Just met this nice article by Laurie Voss called You suck at technical interviews.

Here is TL;DR from there:

many interview techniques test skills that are at best irrelevant to real working life
you want somebody who knows enough to do the job right now
or somebody smart and motivated enough that they can learn the job quickly
you want somebody who keeps getting better at what they do
your interview should be a collaborative conversation, not a combative interrogation
you also want somebody who you will enjoy working with
it’s important to separate “enjoy working with” from “enjoy hanging out with”
don’t hire assholes, no matter how good they are
if your team isn’t diverse, your team is worse than it needed to be
accept that hiring takes a really long time and is really, really hard

Here is the link to original post

Frontend Developer interview. Help for interviewers (1)

The problem

I’m not a huge fan of questions on interviews similar to:

do you know X
did you use Y
what is the difference between X and Y
etc…

Live coding is not something I like as well due to some reasons.

What really helps me to understand how good candidate is, is to discuss some real situations with him/her.

Below is one hypothetical projects to discuss with a candidate.

Frontend Developer interview. Help for interviewers (2)

If you didn’t look at Part 1 of this post please check it out.

Project 2

Given a news site and its admin area. In admin area there are many users. Each user can edit a news-post.

Our goal is to make sure only one user can edit a post even if multiple users are visited the same news-post for editing. Users visited a news-post after the first user should see the “someone else is editing the post” message.

Work remotely by Julia Evans

Really, really awesome blog post from Julia Evans about working remotely.

She has described every worry I have and explained how she managed work over them.

Just found out her blog and it seems very interesting in general.