I recently hired a new developer, and had to spend some time thinking about second interview questions.
The first interview is fairly straightforward: who is the person, what does he/she know, what have they done, etc. The second interview is harder: how would this perso perform if he/she were offered the position?
Here are the questions I used, which are less questions than discussion starters …
How can you develop a complex application and know:
– that it does everything it is supposed to do
– that is is substantially bug-free
If you get this job, how will you ensure that services you build for us will have high availability, reliability, and scalability?
How do you relax/unwind after a hard session of coding/building?
We look at two things, character and competence. You’re competent, that’s why you’re back. Tell me about your character.
We have two user tables, one for Site A and one for Site B. We’re merging the sites and need to merge the user tables. What’s the best way to do it?
It’s 2 days before a major product launch. We’ve made commitments to get functionality A finished. We have it sort of working, but there’s a significant problem. Fixing it means rewriting one of the key modules. You think it’s about 1 day worth of coding. What do you do?
What are your weaknesses? (And don’t tell me that you have a tendency to be too perfectionistic!)
Tell me about a major coding problem you had developing something and how you solved it.