Haoyi's Programming Blog

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2021-11-25 21:00:09

Any software engineer who has ever looked for a job has had the interview experience: being locked in a small room for an hour, asked to write code to solve some arbitrary programming task, while being grilled by one or two interviewers whether or why the code they've written is correct.

You can find lots of material online about how to ace the interview as an interviewee, but very little has been written about how to conduct one as the interviewer. This post will lay out a coherent set of principles and cover many concrete steps you can use to make the most out of the next time you find yourself interviewing a potential software-engineering hire.

About the Author: Haoyi is a software engineer, and the author of many open-source Scala tools such as the Ammonite REPL and the Mill Build Tool. If you enjoyed the contents on this blog, you may also enjoy Haoyi's book Hands-on Scala Programming

When recruiting software engineers, you typically conduct a whole battery of interviews to try and decide if a candidate is someone you would want to work with. While the line-up of interviews may change, there's almost always a programming interview: writing code on a whiteboard/computer, to solve some arbitrary problem, to answer the question "can this person actually write working code?".