Hiring and Interviews

Hiring is very important to small companies. Companies can fail, or succeed, as a result of hiring the wrong person at the wrong time.

As such, we've come up with these guidelines for conducting hiring and doing interviews.

Hiring

[More details required]

Interviews

• Try to keep the interview to a set amount of time. An hour is a good guideline.
  • 10 minutes for introductions
  • 40 minutes for coding
  • 10 minutes for questions and answers
• Pick a coding question that flexes a lot of computer science muscles. A good question might involve a few of the following:
  • Recursion
  • Object-Oriented Programming
  • Queues
  • Data Structures
• Its good to pick a problem that has multiple solutions; it gives the interviewee more opportunity to be creative.
  • Make sure that you understand some of the solutions!
• Pull the plug if the candidate is bombing the interview. You can always say something like 'This isn't going as I expected'
• If a candidate is no-go, be sure to site a real reason as to why they aren't a good fit. E.g. "we're looking for folks that understand a language, not framework" or "a solid understanding of these data structures is really important to us"

Example Questions

[More details required]

Additional resources:

• The Guerilla Interviewing Guide (v3) by Joel Spoelski
• Get that job at Google by Steve Yegge
• Five Essential Phone Screen Questions by Steve Yegge
• On Interviewing Programmers by Jeff Atwood