Junior Engineer Interviewing Senior Engineer - Need Questions

Question

I am a Junior Engineer with under a year experience, primarily as a UI developer. We have a former Lead Programmer who just got laid off who is interviewing at our company, and I am one of the people interviewing him. He has almost 25 years of experience, so obviously it will be pointless to ask him technical questions.

As a junior programmer interviewing someone vastly senior to me, what should I ask? How much time should I take?

Thanks!

Answer 1

I don't know that I'd automatically assume he's vastly superior in terms of technical knowledge.

I know plenty of people with a lot of time served who are dumb as bricks. I don't mean that in a mean way, I just... am less trusting of time served than most.

Answer 2

It is not pointless to ask him technical questions. I have interviewed people twice my age and am dumbfounded by their extensive experience and lack of knowledge. This is not to say that experience doesn't matter, rather experience doesn't necessarily show technical knowledge.

Follow the same procedure as you would in interviewing another programmer for a position. You have to see if the programmer has the skill set you're looking for and fits into the personality of the team.

Answer 3

Rather than asking about tech, how about some nice open questions

1) Which (coding) websites do you use and why

2) What's the best tech book you've read (in last 12 months)

3) What's the most useful thing you've learnt in the last 12 months

Hiring is an art, be prepared to rely on instinct as much as hard facts, they're often correct. Seeing how he'd fit in the company environment is as important as the tech side of things. If you do need tech give him paper/pencil and ask him to design a small piece of code, something relevant to your domain - you can then review that at your leisure.

Answer 4

Ask the candidate for guidance on a problem you recently dealt with. If this person is going to be senior to you, you should be able to have a discussion which indicates if he is willing and/or able to mentor you. Your role may not be to determine the technical chops of the candidate as much as it is simply to determine if it's someone you'd want to work with. Hopefully there will be other senior members of the team interviewing the candidate in the "can he code" way.

So- think about the sorts of questions you might ask your lead or a senior team member, and ask those.

My own preference for interviewing, as candidate or interviewer, is to engage in a real discussion with the other party about actual work issues. If you could do this when you interview me, I would be very impressed.

Answer 5

Ask him something you want to learn about

Ask him a question about something you're interested in on his resume. Tell him you don't know much about it but are interested in learning more.

Depending on how he answers,

• you get a nice tutorial and possibly learn something useful for yourself
• you see how he might be as a senior colleague who will have to explain things to you in future
• you get a feel for "is this someone I want to spend my working day with?"
• you might find out he's full of baloney and doesn't really know what he's talking about.

Answer 6

It's not pointless to ask him technical questions. Feel free to ask him simpler coding questions and then see if he can handle them. Asking things like reverse the words in a string or find a circle in a linked list can be useful. Probe to see how much detail he knows about the answers.

Talk to you senior programmers and get some ideas or look on stack overflow at the interview-questions tag. Just be sure you understand the answers.

Ask him about his previous projects. Ask lots of questions. If you don't have as much experience as he does, it will be a good test whether he can talk on your level or not. Remember that part of what you are looking for is whether or not you can work with him.

Answer 7

I suggest you ask your boss, or whoever assigned you to this interview, what to ask this person and what to look for.

Answer 8

A few things that I consider important when interviewing a senior candidate:

• First, you do need to evaluate technical knowledge. You don't want to offend the senior candidate, but 25 years of blub experience is worse than 2 years of awesome.
• If hired, where will this candidate fit in the social and formal hierarchy? If he's offended that a younger candidate is interviewing him (oh gosh, the gall of kids these days), it is likely to carry on past the interview.
• One of the biggest strengths of veteran developers is project experience. Many times this outweighs technical knowledge. If you're truly junior, you will probably have a hard time evaluating him in this area. It may be good to have a more experienced and less technical partner in the interview with you, just to get two perspectives on questions and response evaluation.
• No (successful) programmer operates in a void. Does this candidate have experience in the domain at your work? You want someone that can understand the fundamental problems at hand, rather than just someone who knows how to "program GUIs".

As far as time goes, I usually spend around 45 minutes with someone; it can vary quite a bit though, depending on the social aspects.

Answer 9

It's definitely not pointless asking technical questions. You probably have product-specific knowledge that he doesn't have, so if there's a specific area he should know about to work on your product, ask him about that.

Just because he's been working for 25 years doesn't mean he's a great programmer, anyway. It's very important to establish a lower bound in interviews, no matter what the resume looks like. Steve Yegge's five essential interview questions are a nice place to start for that and should apply to just about any programming job. (See here.)

There are also important soft skills to figure out. How will he fit with your team? What are his ambitions, both in this role and beyond? Is he ethical?

As far as time goes, it can vary depending on the nature of the interview, but an hour is my default. You should be able to make a plan for what you hope to learn about him and make that kind of evaluation within an hour (most of the time).

Answer 10

Ask: "If you were me, what questions would you ask, and why?" Someone did once ask me this at an interview (and I got the job).

Answer 11

When I interview someone (senior or not,) I like to ask really open ended questions about past experience on their resume. For example, if her resume includes "lead implementation of a fubarmanchu, leading a team of 10 developers," I might ask questions like:

1. What was challenging about development of a fubarmanchu? How did the team go about solving the most difficult technical issue you can remember?
2. What were the primary contributions of the senior staff members?
3. How did tasks get assigned? (if he indicates that the crap work all got put off on junior developers, feel out why that decision was made.)
4. How did the team go about deciding what junior team members should learn which new skills? How did those team members learn them?
5. Tell about a time the team encountered a problem that seemed unsolvable. Who contributed what to the solution? (if the junior members of the team were completely left out, feel out why that was done.)
6. Tell about a time when the team disagreed. Why was there disagreement? How did that disagreement get resolved?
7. Teach me something that was important to understand about fubarmanchu.

Answer 12

Take some of your recent code and get him to review it.
Compare his review with other senior engineers at your company.