Instead of focusing on the task of talking to someone, you end up trying to recollect instances of each kind of event, evaluate them on whether you can talk about them openly, whether they can sound impressive even if they actually are, whether they will sound plausible, whether you can recall enough details to avoid being called out as a bullshitter etc.
The people who can appear to answer these questions best are either a) prepared for them specifically or b) psychopaths who can comfortably lie and twist stories with a smile on their face on the spot.
Do you think there are any style of questions that do work well?
Once you've got some questions in mind that should answer that for an individual, you need to reformulate the questions so that most of them are at least semi-objective and have a scoring criteria that you can use to rank multiple people who passed "yes" on the overall question -- and perhaps a threshold too if you think you can afford "yes, but let's wait to see if we can find someone even better".
In this light, 'tell me about a time when' types of questions aren't often very useful unless they're directly related to an issue you're currently facing and you've precommitted to some sort of score for types of answers. e.g. "time when you've disagreed with boss (or coworker)" might be relevant because your team currently has some drama dynamics. So 0 points for "Oh I never have disagreements", 1 point for "some story that makes me think they won't get eaten alive here and/or be a total pushover, the story details don't really matter", 0 points (or negative) for anything that raises a total asshole flag. The question about new C# features might be useful as a proxy for answering whether they'll be helpful in the future, i.e. do they keep up-to-date about things and keep learning, so maybe that's worth a point if they can name something and maybe you can ask a different question as another proxy to normalize across interests (they might not care about PL features but something else). And depending on the real concern being proxied, sometimes you can just ask about the real concern directly.
If you can, make a work-sample test: https://sockpuppet.org/blog/2015/03/06/the-hiring-post/
How much experience must someone have to be a junior developer in your opinion?
- what makes a good test?
- what makes a bad test?
Possible good test answers (I'd expect maybe one or two - bonus points if you can talk about them as lived experience rather than text book)
Tests one thing/clear what causes a failure
Documents the code well
Describes the purpose of the code
Something about naming
Something about BDD
Something about arrange act assert
Something about how quickly it runs
Discussion of relative merits of unit, integration, e2e etc.
What's a Bad test answers...
Brittle (bonus if you mention this in relation to refactoring)
Asserting multiple things
Tautological
Very slow to run (with which I'd follow up with "any exceptions to this)
Plus you'll get lots of points if you bring up something I've not thought of before.
- A bug that was particularly difficult to track down? (What did you learn? What would you do differently?)
- A time you disagreed with your manager/lead? (And a time when in retrospect you think you were right/wrong/got your way/didn't get your way?)
- a piece of work took much longer than you anticipated? (what did you/would you do to prevent it happening again?)
- you had to quickly learn a new thing?
For more specific technical stuff I like to try and find questions that allows someone to show off, rather than tests if they know just one thing. We're using Typescript, C# and TDD...
- what new or upcoming features in C# do you most like using/would like to get the chance to use/really wish were out already?
- what parts of Typescript do you find most useful vs Javascript?
- what makes a good test?
- what makes a bad test?
I don't see why anyone wants to ask anything of the what does using `ref int foo` mean, especially when there's lots of competition in the job market at the moment!
https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/full-stack-c%23-vuejs-typ...