On: How to Interview Engineers

[losteric]

This is why it's important to start the interview with culture/work history questions to probe how they're feeling, watching their body language, before moving on to simple questions of increasing complexity.

I've literally started nervous people with "naively print the string 'hello'"... After warming up, the best one eventually completed my max-difficulty questions.

[crispyambulance → losteric]

This is the way to go.

I would add that it takes significant experience and preparation to interview people effectively. This is a difficult-to-learn soft-skill that not everyone has.

Too often folks just get dragged into an interviewer situations with no planning or coordination.