When does a programmer really make the leap to technical leadership? A lot of people would say it starts with managing people. One of the most important things you do as a manager is to help your team recruit people. To put it bluntly, you’re going to go from typing code to interviewing candidates typing code.

How to be a good interviewer is the first stop to become a technical leader.

When you interview someone for the first time, you’re nervous, excited, or even a little excited: After all these interviews, you’re finally getting to interview someone else.

Then the question comes: how to interview candidates, in order to better pick out my future colleagues, at the same time high-end atmosphere, fully show the standard of our company?

BUG interviewed some tech titans for you to see how they interview candidates. The first one is the interview record of Li Yafei, the founder of Showmebug. As a technology expert for 10 years, he has worked in big companies and startups, and started his own business for 3 times in a row. His experience in interviewing talents is constantly upgraded, becoming more and more efficient and direct.

Let’s take a look at how he interviews programmers.

1. How can the group leader effectively interview future team members?

There are three stages in my journey to recruit programmers.

The first stage is in large companies.

After graduation in 2010, I joined Shenconvincing. After one or two years, I became the technical leader and began to interview others to recruit for Shenconvincing’s advanced automated test team. The point of an interview is not to quickly select the right people, but to quickly get rid of the wrong people. So, in the first stage of a big company, I don’t need to think about the interview process and screening resumes. The focus of the interview is to quickly eliminate those who are not a good fit.

II. How does CTO inspect technical personnel in all aspects

In the second stage, I worked for a startup as a CTO, where I had to help build a technical team.

I will also cooperate with HR, and I will tell HR some of my recruitment requirements. In addition to some basic requirements such as educational background and working years, I also have some preferences: 1) besides the mainstream language, I can learn a Ruby or Python language; 2) I have my own technical blog, such as GitHub, and then the HR will screen the resume according to these requirements. Finally, I will come for the interview.

At this stage of the interview I have some of my own routines. After asking for self-introduction and project experience, begin to dig deeper into the projects the candidate has done.

What was the status of the project you were working on?


What are the problems?


How did you solve these problems?


What is your reflection?

A candidate’s work style can be gelled by the problems he has solved in the past.

And then I’m going to ask some basic technical questions.

What do you think of threads and processes?


How do you understand process descriptors?


Individual programming language features


What do you think about the future of Ruby3.0

The first question is to examine the candidate’s basic skills. It is just like a horse’s gait. A good horse’s gait makes a steady punch. It is the same with technology. Only when you have a solid basic skills can you better solve more complex problems.

The second question is to look at specific moves, how you use technology to solve specific problems.

The third question looks at the potential of the candidate, whether there is growth in the future.

Therefore, from these three dimensions: basic skills, specific moves, growth potential, to comprehensively examine the candidate’s basic technical literacy.

After examining the comprehensive qualities and basic technical literacy, we come to the most important part: solving the real technical problems of the job.

At this time, I will put forward some technical problems we have encountered in the work and see his ideas on how to solve them. A lot of times candidates talk big, but when they actually do it, they don’t. So I use ShowMeBug to show a snippet of code from a specific business we’re working on, and then we can communicate based on that snippet. You can even get the candidate to write code and see how good they are.

How do startups hire people?

And then when I started my own business, I had to hire myself.

The first wave started with familiar friends, based on trust, and finding people to work with. Plus, I’m often active in the tech community and have a certain reputation, so it’s relatively easy for me to recruit technology.

But to hire others, you have to hire from the market. After a while, I found that very few candidates were satisfied with what I wanted, so I had to water down my requirements. Other requirements have been lowered, but at least the recruitment can work ah, so this time the interview will pay special attention to practical ability. Then it is most efficient to interview with the online code of ShowMeBug.

conclusion

The purpose of an interview is to recruit people to work with in the future. So to get a more accurate picture of how a candidate is doing on the job, think of the interview as a “technical discussion” with a potential colleague.

Since it is a technical discussion, it must try to avoid should test/objective questions, pure back the answer, can not see the train of thought; And there’s no need to deliberately suppress the other person by asking about areas that the other person doesn’t understand at all. The most appropriate thing is to start from the real work situation, discuss together, and test his ability in the process.

Most of them are like me. Without any training, they were caught by HR to be an interviewer. After several times of tension, they gradually formed a routine and formed their own standards. Also hope that this article to our technical personnel in the process of growth to provide a little help.