Managing Humans: Biting and Humorous Tales of a Software Engineering Manager, Third Edition

© Michael Lopp 2016

Michael Lopp, Managing Humans, 10.1007/978-1-4842-2158-7_33

33. Bellwethers

Defining an interview beyond the technical

Michael Lopp¹ 

(1)Los Gatos, California, USA

Let’s start by not deluding ourselves. Hiring anyone is a risk. Google is famous for the intense and lengthy scrutiny they put their candidates under. The Google interview might be intense, but when they decide to hire, they’re rolling the dice.

You’re not going to know whom you hired for months.

This doesn’t mean you can’t improve your odds.

For me, success in an interview is extracting as much information as possible from the candidate. This doesn’t happen because you’ve got a compelling set of interview questions; it comes from throwing a wildly different set of interviewers ...