Interviews are on my mind again (read into that whatever you want) and I’ve been having conversations about the experience on both sides of the Zoom camera.
Finding out whether a candidate can do the job is incredibly challenging. The usual slate of techniques—from so-called “experiential questions” (“tell me about a time when you didn’t agree with a coworker”) to google-style brain teasers (“how would you go about finding out the weight of the moon using nothing but croutons”) to supposed leetcode questions (“You have two linked lists and you need to combine them”)—fall short in so many ways, but primarily they fail in the most critical way: