On Interview Questions

I was reading this site, which lists questions that people have been asked during interviews for programming or IT positions. Many of the questions are strange or just inappropriate. For example:

Trivia: Asking for obscure bits of information won't give you insight into the person's abilities. It's a waste of time for me to ask if you know who originally wrote a library or what the date of its first release was.

Reference Material: Why ask questions about things that are unlikely to be memorized and can be easily looked up? I can't imagine looking at a requirement and saying "we'll let Fred implement this since he has memorized the entire API."

Jump Through the Hoop: Questions that are designed to be difficult without any real purpose. Specifically, algorithmic questions that are not nearly as easily solved in an interview environment as they would be sitting at a desk with silence and a computer. Some of the most talented people I know need to be in "work mode" to do work.

The ability to solve problems which are designed for an interview are fairly useless. One of the most important assets an engineer can offer is presence. In other words, if you bring requirements to an engineer, can they:

1. See through requirements docs to understand what the person actually wants?
2. See the entire design in a broad sense?
3. Break the overall design into logical parts?
4. Consider if the requirements make sense for the entire code base?
5. Express their ideas clearly?

The best engineers can look beyond what they're asked to do, and can actually understand and communicate what is likely to be needed. You can go too far, of course. There has to be a sense of focus on the main tasks, but robots don't create great software. We need more human intuition in software design.

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