016: Interviewing

Working Code

This week, the crew sits down to talk about interviewing, both from the side of the interviewer and from the side of interviewee. What are we looking for? What are the red flags? What kinds of questions should we be asking? Are we putting too much faith in the sanctity of the interview process? And, why the heck does Zappos offer to pay you $2,000 not to work there?!

This discussion is particularly insightful because Carol shares her perspective as a female which includes things most men will have never considered. For example, did you know that you can ask ahead of time who will be interviewing you? And, that it's even OK to ask for a woman to be present on the interview panel? This underscores the importance of creating and hiring for a diverse team: everyone's perspective is different; and, everyone's perspective is valuable. And, when we only hire people that look and act like us, we only see the human experience through a small window.

Each week, our top Patreon supporters get a sponsored shout-out. And, today's shout-out goes to Girls Who Code, an organization who's mission it is to close the gender gap in technology and to change the image of what a programmer looks like and does.

Triumphs & Failures

• Adam's Triumph - In 2014, he wrote REST Assured, a no-nonsense ebook about architecting RESTful APIs. Now in 2021 - by popular demand - this digital work is finally coming to a paperback near you! And of course, we're all demanding signed copies!
• Ben's Failure - this past week just left him feeling destroyed. Between the "Spring forward" clock change, an absurd number of meetings, and the abysmal performance of his ColdFusion custom tag DSL inside a Docker container, this whole week has felt like a kick in the gut. Not every week is going to be a winner; and, he just hopes that next week is better!
• Carol's Triumph - she bought a daily-planer to help her keep track of what she's done today; and, what she needs to get done tomorrow. Part optimization, part self-care, writing everything down allows her to see a clear record of what she's accomplished; which, in turn, allows her to embrace her own success and feel good about stepping away from her desk when she needs to take a break.
• Tim's Triumph - his plan is really coming together! After months-and-months of consulting with customers, writing business plans, organizing marketing campaigns, collecting testimonials, obtaining budgets, running things by Legal, and working with Quality Assurance (QA), all the pieces are falling into place. And, for him, it's been a truly humbling experience. As engineers, we can be lulled into thinking that we are the center of the universe; but, when one see just how many people are involved in bringing a product to market, it becomes clear that we are just small cogs in a massive, harmonious machine.

Notes & Links

• The MEGA Interview Guide - a humble guide to give developers the tools they need to nail technical interviews!
• Awesome Interview Questions - a curated list of lists of technical interview questions.
• Cracking the Coding Interview - the 6th edition of the book's crowd-sourced solutions guide.
• MOVA - a fake programming language created to help weed-out nefarious recruiters and engineers.
• How to Deal with Difficult People on Software Projects - a breakdown of different work personalities and how to work effectively with them.

Follow the show! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.