My FaceBook applications.

Notice the lack of Zombies, Werewolves and Slayers. It’s all business (SuperWall and FunWall stayed because they are sometimes funny distractions). What does your “business” FaceBook look like?

The art of technical interviewing.

Darren Neimke forwarded me a question from LinkedIn this morning. It was from another person with great technical skills in the ASP.NET developer community.

As it happens I have done a fair bit of technical interviewing in the past and I am continuously evolving ways to find out more about the candidate that I am talking to. Whilst you can put a lot of metrics around the interview process (scoring etc) it remains a bit of an art form which means its something that you only get better at with practice.

Within Readify there are efforts underway to standardise the way we perform our technical interviews. As with all discussion with technical interviewing it seems to come back to build lists of questions, but answering questions is not what a technical interview is about. I believe it is all about:

• Finding out if the candidate is passionate about technology.
• Finding out the depth of the candidate by asking questions.

The devil is in the detail though. Rather than having a list of cute questions draw upon your own experience to guide the discussion. Have a rough list of topics and some starter questions by all means but you aren’t just ticking boxes, you are looking for understanding.