 So this this is exciting because this is a new episode. I don't know this one I know how many times all we have to record this one. Let's find out So I want you to cover a less technical topic there we go We just lost 50% of our viewers right there and then but goodbye. Thank you. Thank you to everyone who stayed Because I do think it's an important one for most developers. I want to talk about interviewing like particularly interviewing for technical roles. That's a Controversial topic, isn't it? Oh, well, I'm sure we'll find out in the comments if it's controversial or not But yeah, I think interviewing is really difficult As a system It's unusual. They imagine that after a speed dating session You had to send one of the people you met a marriage proposal there and then because that's kind of how interviews work, right? You spend you know, they made TV shows out of that concept, right? What with the job thing or the marriage thing the marriage thing speed dating then marriage That's interesting, isn't it? Because like, yeah shows like The Apprentice they spend a whole series on it But like some of these dating shows it is just like an hour. So I guess that is More realistically like an interview. I think interviewing well as an I Interviewing can mean so many things. It is you know you want you're looking for someone to add to your business to your company and I guess the purpose is Figuring out if that person that you are considering a candidate is actually Good for the role and if you are good for the candidates. Yeah, exactly Yeah, you get an hour or two with them to decide that and then you pick one and Propose that you enter into a long-term relationship back by a contract. There you go job done So I thought I would give my tips for interviewing. I don't claim to be perfect at it But I've been doing it for a number of years. So these are just my reckons really But at Google I was given an award for being one of the top interviewers, which means the most interviews not the best interviews Yes, okay fair enough it was more the number But they get me to do them cuz I'm cuz I'm good at them. That's what I tell myself Can you remember what the award was by the way? Do you mean the the yellow helium balloon star, that's right I got a balloon. So and it lived on your desk. I think for a considerable amount of time I had that balloon for Nine months, I think it it was a good balloon. It was a high quality balloon And even once that balloon started to drift down and hit my co-workers in the face And they said can you get rid of that? I said No, that's my balloon I got it for doing interviews and keeping it until it hits the floor that sounds like a little, you know Jokey embellishment, but that actually happens like we we were all observing the balloon Slight have her slightly lower every day as it slowly fell to his death and I people thought I got rid of it because it was gone But what I'd actually done is put it in the recycling bin knowing that when someone would open the recycling bin The balloon would come back out I'm fun to work with anyway If you're watching this at home, and you think you know better than me interviewing Where's your balloon show me your balloon and then we'll talk that's what I'm saying But yeah, a lot of this is subjective and I'm I'm looking forward to the discussion in the comments around this and hearing other points of Use provided the moderators don't delete everything as they've been doing recently. Sorry about that But here are my reckons first up I want to talk about the general attitude and And you hit upon this a Before you're trying to find the candidate who's going to be the best employee for your company The best teammate for you as well. If that's what you're hiring for My first piece of advice is don't try to defeat the candidate and This sounds obvious. I see this a lot late The candidate is competing against other candidates indirectly. They're not competing against you You're not there to try and catch them out That you should try and be on the candidate side like you would with a with a teammate and I say should because we know from Twitter and YouTube comments that there are a lot of people who have the personality of the Riddler from Batman You know, it's all of that kind of I am more superior than you therefore I win and I just say to people like that grow up pack that in and definitely do not take it into a job interview because it's Horrible thing to do It might seem like I'm laboring implement inheritance just with functions and manual prototype manipulation. You don't you fail I've definitely got that stuff wrong before as well like what you just said there. I I've used that question in interviews and I am embarrassed about it So I'm saying stuff the advice I'm giving here like I say, I'm not perfect it's based on the stuff that I've got wrong as well and it might seem like I'm laboring some of these points, but You watch TV and films and the way interviews are dramatized there. A lot of people think that's how it's supposed to be Let's take a tech example a friend of mine interviewed for an agency in London And as part of the interview they asked her to take a look at their websites their agency sites and you know Suggest things that could be improved that kind of thing and they had this 404 page that was this Big cute image, you know cute four or four pages, right? You've seen them before But she pointed out that you know their website has this consistent now at the top and at the bottom Except their 404 page and she was like well Hang on this this could be a problem because a 404 is a dead end for the user that they might have had a misspelled URL Something and you're not giving that now that that way of that they could help themselves out So that there's an improvement And this didn't sit well clearly with with well the head of design at the company and during the q&a section Launched in with I've got a question for you. Why do you hate delight? And I was told this story five years ago and it still makes me angry because it's exactly that, you know My friend did learn from that experience that there was someone senior in the company who was Toxic so kind of dodged a bullet so it was useful in some ways But seriously like a candidate is nervous in an interview situation and they're in an unfamiliar place So if you're the kind of person that takes advantage of that to land some punches You're a bully like there's no pride or honor in that there's no benefit in doing it It's a suggestion and I don't think also don't think those two things were mutually exclusive You could have still left the four-poor page cute with the head bar and a bottom bar Um, and you could I mean it's your opinion to disagree with a candidate's suggestion But you have just enough to justify your opinion as they have to justify theirs So in the end it should be an actually a constructive dialogue And I think if anything as you said the company failed that interview themselves then Yeah, absolutely My next piece of advice is uh, don't judge the candidate on unrelated things and again It's another I mean your shirt is questionable today I've come quite bright today I I actually bought this for doing these recordings because like every time we've been filming I keep getting told to wear something brighter So I actually bought this with recording in mind Which is unusual for you because you usually rep the conference shirts exclusively I usually wear shirts. I got for free at conferences But turns out conferences aren't happening right now. So I've had to start buying clothing so I think of me during the pandemic Had to buy clothes But yeah, don't judge people on unrelated things and yeah clothing is one of them But I saw this twitter thread recently where someone in the web development community was saying they judge candidates on the setup of their code editor like An example they gave was the the kind of syntax highlighting they use and this is Similar to judging people by clothes and I do have friends in old tech Who will judge people by the suit they wear to the interview And in both cases like syntax highlighting the suit thing Folks will defend that attitude by saying well, it tends to correlate with ability or it tends to correlate with professionalism in terms of the suit thing, but These things are just feeding into your biases and If you interview properly You can actually test for ability. You can actually test for professionalism You don't have to crystal ball these things. You don't have to read tea leaves of a thing because it's it's inaccurate and it's unfair Yeah, I mean statistics rule 101 is correlation is not the same thing as causation just because things correlate doesn't allow you to Look at the effect and you know imply back that the cause is also true I you know, I remember that the the core team of Go the programming language you know pretty famous people with Rob Pike and ross cox and some of the people and they all are advocates of not using syntax highlighting Are you telling me that those people are not highly productive good engineers? I am not so sure and as you say like don't I mean that the main problem is don't use proxy metrics don't If you are in an interview you can as you just said Actually measure directly whether capabilities that you need are present in the candidate There's no need to rely on proxy metrics like this person is not using the same error as me. Therefore bad absolutely, um to give a couple examples of that 10 years ago I was doing some job interviews and I took along one of those tiny little notebook laptop things that were a trend at the time And I had sublime text on it. I didn't use it often for coding But it was sort of set up. It wasn't set up well, but it was possible And I brought that along with me for coding interviews and the reason I was bringing that along with me Is it was the only portable device I had it was the one that I could afford I had a desktop machine at home But this was the one portable device I could afford could have brought that I guess I could have could have brought the whole desktop unit Slammed that down on the desk and it's like can I get a plug socket plug socket anyone? But yeah, so so but if It's kind of horrible to think that someone would see this tiny laptop and think that that's how I normally did things or that That was the best I could set up an IDE And the same goes with clothing like to most job interviews I've been to I'm wearing what I was wearing for my job like my job at the time because if I turned up for work with a suit There's only so many times that I can say, you know wedding or funeral Well, what is it today? Or it's a funeral this time. Yeah, it's a funeral for the person that got married yesterday It was a very eventful wedding, you know, like it doesn't work people are just going to wear What they were wearing or you know what they're comfortable with But I would say there are exceptions to some of these things like Maybe there are cases where the role does involve Seeing how the candidate handles someone who's being aggressive and argumentative Maybe the role doesn't fall familiarity with some of the IDE trends plugins Or maybe the role does involve someone being dressed in a particular way Again, you should test for these things But also tell the candidate that that's what you're testing for like days in advance Like tell them that's what you're going to be assessing. So they should prepare for that Like, you know, if you're going to have a coding test, let them know you're going to have a coding test If they need to bring their own laptop let them know it's Yeah, it sounds simple, but it goes wrong in practice quite a lot. I agree and I think There could be more clarity here as well in many instances that I've seen where it's just like What you're going to test and how you're going to test it like often, you know We often talk about either whiteboard interviews Which have gotten a lot of criticism because that's not how you do your job Like you don't write code on a whiteboard and I know how I remember how painful it is to like Write code write curly braces with a big marker on a big whiteboard It's just not how your eye has been trained on a daily basis to perceive your own code And it will just Lower your abilities and even to this day often end up in a situation where I have to tell an interview candidate that You know, they expect people to write their code in a google doc, which is better than on a whiteboard But a google doc is not what we are used to writing code in so, you know Google docs doesn't take care of indentation or Syntax highlighting or any of those sort of things and so I always try to be very vocal about like I understand This is not your IDE. Don't worry about, you know, syntactical errors Misspelled API names. We all know that IDEs take care of that for us. It's about Talking about the problem knowing that you have the right solution often, you know We also know that we google a lot. We get help from the internet, which Sometimes in interviews for some reason is frowned upon which I technically I also don't understand And all these things I think should as you say should be laid out before and what are the criteria Why are these criteria there and what is allowed what is not allowed? And and most of what you just said on when it comes to coding questions Has just taken care of a big chunk of my content that's coming up later Apologies, we can just skip my comments. No, no, that's not we'll keep those in because I can just skip it later on but and I do want to talk more about Testing for coding, but first I want to just start with the very beginning of the interview Or even just slightly before the interview because I would say Make sure the candidate is comfortable Like do they need a bathroom break? Do they a break for any other reason? Do they need a drink? Some of these are more important when it comes to on-site interviews than You know vc interviews But Give an example. We had a candidate come into google who they'd had to Rush because a train was delayed so they'd sort of run to the office And as such they were sweating and so I just said hey, do you want to take 20 minutes to cool down? And They said yes, and I don't know if they would have asked for that if I didn't offer it But it felt important because well, I know how I get in that situation Like I end up in a sweat loop because I'm sweating because I'm hot then I start getting embarrassed that I'm sweating and Eventually just shame Ends up siphoning all of the water out of my body and I am not going to interview well when I'm like that No, and that's the thing if you're running, you know Evolutionarily speaking you are in fight-or-flight Which means your blood is anywhere in your muscles, but not your brain Which will significantly hurt your chances of using it correctly and those things Interviewers I think need to be aware of. Yep. You you want the candidate at their best So enable them to be that all right. Let's talk about the questions I would say maybe this is controversial, but use the same questions for each candidate Like some say I won't they prefer more flowing natural conversation But I prefer the same questions because it's a stronger basis for comparison It also avoids some unconscious bias Like you can branch off your questions with follow-ups and that kind of thing But I would say stick to the same core questions for each candidate I actually do the same thing I have the same question I've been using for a long time which actually is helpful because I know What my level of expectation should be like what is the bell curve of People at different levels. How far do they get? What kind of traps do they run into? How can I recognize early what you know? What holotype of interview candidate this is and how can I help them get over a hump that is potentially just a red herring to actually evaluating their actual performance and capabilities So I think it's it's really really good advice and yeah, you can refine it over time You can find different branches over time for people with different skills Some people care about memory optimization. Some people care about runtime optimization Some people care about the visualization and all of these things you can usually take your problem down different roads while Still sticking to the original question. So you know what to expect Absolutely, but I would say for the first question start open-ended and controversial Don't make it a big technical deep dive like try and ease the candidate in I usually go for something like In terms of work, what do you enjoy doing? Or what do you want to focus on in apologies? Yeah, I was jumping to technical Like coding questions, but you're right Obviously the interview doesn't shouldn't start with that actually because it is very important to get to know your candidate So and just you know, what kind of person are you talking to? Yeah, and it just me it gives them an easy question that they can answer as well So it kind of puts them at ease I would say especially if you're saying what do you want to do in the role or what do you enjoy doing? I have seen a lot of candidates Um, I would say this correlates with younger candidates, but that doesn't matter But it does tend to uh, we'll say something like or they'll take an attitude of like, I'll do whatever it takes So, you know, they're really eager to please And if that happens, I try and nip that in the bud and say no, like, you know Here's the things that I like to focus on. Here's the things I don't like You know by example saying look, it's it's okay To to have a focus. It's okay to have an opinion on this stuff And with this question. Yeah, it's mostly about easing them in but I'm also looking to see that they've thought about the role Uh, that they have enough experience to know the things they enjoy I mean, and this is specific to developer relations, but I always think developer relations has so many different facets, right? You can You can do the stupid stuff that we do by doing videos. You can write articles. You can write libraries You can go to conferences. You can Communicate more with the engineering team and help them out set the right roadmap There's so many different facets of developer relations that are Part of the role that actually nobody can do all of these at the same time at the at the same level You will be better at some and you will enjoy some more than others And that's exactly what is interesting actually about candidates. Where do they see their strengths and what kind part do they actually Know is part of the role which part they maybe didn't know is part of the role These are all interesting conversations to have. Yes, but no matter what the first question is there's something else that happens quite a lot And that's that the candidate has been thinking about this interview for a while they've been thinking of what they're going to say and the points they want to get across And sometimes the question you ask first doesn't quite match what they were expecting But they're not going to let that stop them. They're going to give the answer to the question they wish you asked instead and It's tempting to get sarcastic at this point but again You're not there to win avoid telling them off just let them say they're a bit and then rephrase your question and Ask it again. Yeah, and we have you have to be careful that people are going to be nervous like they're potentially they're scared to bits that they're now depending on the company have one interview two interviews five interviews and They probably want to get the job. Otherwise, they wouldn't be here And that might just inhibit them from parsing the question correctly And some people need to prepare for an interview To feel calm and to be able to get through it And so it it is as you say it is tempting to be like uh candidate can't even listen to a question but Be careful about those kind of assumptions and I always say if that's something they do throughout the interview It's not worthy that you know, they're not great at listening Maybe And that could be an issue for an employee, but if it's with the first question I wouldn't worry about it. All right. Let's do a little bit of let's do a role play for this for this next point So much. Oh boy. I want you to ask me the question that is on the screen All right, Jake Hello, how would you defeat? a giant robot army Uh, well, um a good question by the way I would build an even bigger robot suit and I would Punch all the evil robots in their robot dicks until they were very sorry about the whole thing and the planet was saved Well done 10 out of 10. You're hired Okay, let's try that again Another question for you Jake so tell me about a time you helped defeat a giant robot army I've never done that fired And if you were looking for someone to fight giant robots, you just learned something useful. I don't have the experience now Aspirational questions are okay, especially as an opener But if there's a way to phrase your question that taps into actual experience, I would say that's usually the better way Like if you ask the candidate, how would you handle a disagreement with a co-worker? You're asking for a theoretical answer You'll get you'll get a fantasy answer and that's not as useful as if you said Tell me about a disagreement you had with a co-worker and what you did to resolve it Now you're getting something. I punched him in the face Exactly. Well, that's that that's an important thing to learn You want to learn that is if you've got someone violent on your hands That's something you want to learn as early as possible. Hopefully before hiring them But yeah, you if you're asking for evidence you learn about their experience You learn about their attitude you also learn about their communication skills through the they're telling of the story If the candidate doesn't have an answer Offer them thinking time If they can't think of anything then say sure, okay, you can give me the theoretical version. What would you do? Not very useful to you, but at least the candidate gets through the question, uh, which brings me to my next point Try to avoid making a candidate feel like a failure like even if they Kind of are like if they if they flunk a question try and try and make it so it they didn't Interviews are stressful and high pressure You're trying to get the best out of the candidate if they struggle with a question help them through it Even if it becomes useless to you In terms of the interview at least they feel like they got through it And they're not taking negative baggage into the next question or the next interview Because it could have just been that one question that they struggle with like due to nerves They got in a mess or or whatever. Yeah, or you tapped into their weak spot in terms of topic These are all like it could just be That you as the one interviewer got unlucky with this candidate in a specific constellation and on that note I would also avoid the typical phrases where you go like, oh, that's an interesting answer because even though it is sugar coated Inter interview candidates can pick up on that and then you have just increased the pressure without even realizing so try to be genuine about Helping them and actually wanting them to succeed Also, I'd say that if you're expecting the candidate to say something negative about themselves or the company Make sure the candidate knows that's okay Like a lot of candidates are nervous about this and it'll work against them What they tend to do is actually say something positive But like wrap it as a negative like, you know, my problem is I'm too helpful Or I think the problem of the company is there's no way it can be improved or something like that So just let them know. Hey, you know say something negative about yourself or you know say that you're looking for people who Will change things about the company. So you're looking for people with those kinds of ideas So it kind of puts them you're letting them know it's safe to say negative things about themselves or about the company Okay It's time that we talked about The coding question which we've sort of mentioned You really dull my content so no is this Your points were very good because it's some of the stuff that I wanted to say as well I think it's Coding tests are controversial. I think it's good to assess the candidate's ability Whether a coding exercise is the right way. I don't know for sure I I tend to do a 20 to 30 minute coding exercise in an interview As such the questions I use tend to be simplified compared to real-world equivalents, which Is a weakness of that system There are alternatives. I've seen companies do homework assignments or longer pair programming sessions It's a it's a difficult balance to get right like something short is short, which is good Something longer can be more realistic, but then it might not be respectful of the candidate's time Like remember they've got a full-time job. So if you're Taking them in for you know a whole day Of job experience essentially one. I hope you're paying them for that But also, you know, they've got a full-time job. Did they actually? You know, you're taking a lot of their time away to do this on the one hand, you know, the coding exercise doing an interview is inherently unrealistic of an engineering job because You will spend the entire day on coding most likely and not just 20 minutes on a problem You have just discovered where you are not allowed to google things. It is inherently unrealistic Some companies have you know, try to make it more realistic by taking a bigger realistic problem and giving the candidate a week to take it home But as you said that is not only disrespectful potentially of their time because they might have a job So they now have to sacrifice their evenings But also companies are giving them work that they could actually use like that that is useful to them And now they have interview candidates do work for them, which is also not fair So it is an extremely delicate balance to strike Yes, and I'm going to stick to my experience here. Uh, so the small coding exercise In terms of that stuff, I would say avoid write this particular algorithm The infamous invert the binary tree. Yeah, so instead of Write code to invert this binary tree present a more real world example Which could be solved by inverting a binary tree If the candidate realizes that inverting a binary tree is the right way to solve the problem That's like 85 of the problem solved like in the real world They could look up how to invert a binary tree if they if they couldn't remember it The important bit is being able to connect the the theory with the practice Uh, a lot of candidates like they cram learn all of these algorithms but If they can't see a problem and realize which algorithm they need to use You know, that's That's a gap in their learning and it's it's something that's useful to you as an interviewer to find that out early Because those connections are a most important thing. Yeah as a as a little tip from me as an interviewer who to people who Take interviews who interview at companies For me and I actually I can I only can speak for myself obviously, but If you are solving a problem and you know There exists an algorithm or you even know the name but not how it works For me, it is a 10 out of 10 points answer if you say let's assume I have the function called invert binary tree and you just call it without Like you just use it in your code without having the implementation knowing an algorithm of the top of your head and how to implement it to me is not part of the job unless you are working on I don't know the The library that is inverting binary trees and you are interviewing for that job Then yes, then that is part of the job But that is the niche in the general case if you know there are solutions and you can even name them You get full points from my end. Yeah, I would say when I'm interviewing as well It doesn't matter if they can't name the algorithm like if they write what is inverting a binary tree But they never say the words binary tree or inverting doesn't matter. I don't Need someone to name those things I would say yeah, try and find something real world as well Like maybe a problem that you solved as part of The job that they're applying for but of course if it's something that took you hours to solve It's not fair to expect them to solve it in 30 minutes So you would really sort of boil it down to maybe the the interesting parts that are solvable in a short amount of time Uh, also try and find something with multiple phases It's something that has like a simple solution that maybe isn't optimal And then you can build on top of it to make make it better or make it faster or make it hit edge cases I strongly agree with this. I I like problems with multiple solutions with different Not only complexity, but it's a trade-off and even just having a conversation about these trade-offs can be very interesting To assess how much the candidate has thought about trade-offs memory trade-off runtime trade-off Code complexity maintenance trade-off. These are all things that you know matter Usually in in real cases and it helps you Ensure that as you said earlier Feel make the candidate feel like they're succeeding because it is the more solutions that are possible The more likely it is they will find one of them and can Help you or can can explain them to you and something that actually is really nice once they found a solution Is something that I often like asked them to write one or two unit tests, which you know, that's nice makes them think about Can can they actually know abstract the interface? Can they figure out edge cases are worth testing? How do they test and all these little things can be very very interesting to talk about? Yes, and if the candidate struggles as well if you've got a multi-phased Question you can just help them to one of the phases the next phase and then call it a day And you know the candidate feels like they've achieved something. They're not taking negative energy into the into the next interview I would say if you're doing that kind of thing Be careful. You don't scare the candidate with simplicity like let them know it's multiple phases I've seen candidates freeze up because the start of a question is relatively simple They feel it's simple and they're looking for the gotcha. They're looking for the complicated bit. They haven't spotted, but it's not there Yeah, and I've definitely had that one my one of my old questions or one of my old series of interview questions for the coding started with okay, let's Make the tools we need for the bigger question. What how do you generate a random number between a and b? and As exactly as you said people froze up and we're wondering like They had a solution, but surely it can't be that simple and so I I've learned over time to be like This is not a trick question. We are building simple tools that we can put together later on for something way bigger So just roll with me. Yeah, I would say I definitely avoid using the word simple as well in case The candidate does that's a very good advice I usually say something like if you think of a solution, but you're unsure whether it's optimal or complete Don't worry about it. Write it down It's better to write something down and then we build upon that Rather than try and get it perfect first time and end up with nothing Which I have seen happen in some interviews as well during these questions helping the candidate It's fine. Just make a note of how much help they needed because that's part of your assessment Again, it means they leave the question. Hopefully feeling positive as well Here's here's something that you mentioned earlier as well allow them to use their own laptop Don't make them code on a whiteboard like if they want to use a whiteboard. That's fine But don't make them don't make them code in the google doc. And this is me apologizing for every Google interview where this still happens I refuse to take part in this even if the interview advice I'm given is telling me to use a google doc I don't because I just don't think it's right So yes, that does still happen. I'm sorry about it. No, people should be using the environment that they are comfortable with Also, try not to assess too much at once If you're testing the algorithmic problem solving tell them you're not worried about variable naming because that probably doesn't matter You said some of this stuff before if you do care about variable naming Maybe present them with some badly written code and ask them to refactor it to be more maintainable Because then the algorithm's already there. They don't have to worry about that. They just have to read the code and make it better Also, don't test memory Uh You said this as well allow them to look stuff up like method names like remembering How slice works versus substring in JavaScript. It doesn't matter I usually tell candidates to use me as a search engine and they can ask me any questions And I will tell them or I'll look it up myself because it's good to sort of hear where where they're What they're thinking and that's a good way of doing that. I whenever I I've done the same thing where I often offer candidates to use their editor instead of the google doc and some candidates still choose the google doc, but you know, it's their choice at that point But in in in the editor where I just asked them to share the screen with me so I can see what they're doing And I don't think autocomplete is cheating not at all. Like it is a tool. We all use when we work Why would it be cheating? I've seen this a couple of times where people You know, you are not allowed like it's more like an exam where they expect you to know everything on the top of your head which is just wildly Unrealistic and not in line with what the job actually looks like we all make mistakes more so under interview pressure And if the candidate has like an off by one error Is it worth making them sweat over it? I tend to ignore it or say hey online 12 you've gotten off by one error And they'll they'll spot it. It's it's not worth it. It's something they would see in the real world when they ran the code I'm not going to show you the coding question I use Because then I'd have to pick a new one and I like my coding question too much But here's the example of the kind of thing I'm talking about. So this would be aimed at web developers who are expected to write javascript It's kind of showing can they fetch some jason and append some stuff to the page I wouldn't expect them to remember the dom apis I'm just looking to see if they know how the dom works and How async code works because that that is something that they will have to do in the real world And then in like a second phase of the question I'd say okay our api returns 10 results at a time You know, we'll fix that one day, but in the meantime, we'd like to display 50 results at once Can you make that happen with this api? So now they have to do five fetches? It tests more advanced async stuff Can they return the stuff in the right order? Do they fetch it one by one or do they fetch it all together? Do they wait until they've got all of the results before putting any of them on the page? Like these are all little phases. They you know, they might choose Yeah, they fetch the first set of results and then they start fetching the next one And then you could say to them. Hey, you know, is there any way you could make this faster by You know, well, I wouldn't tell them by fetching it all at once unless they needed the hint But see if they could figure that out themselves like there are many layers to something like this Um, ask them if there are certain user interactions that might Cause bugs here like could they spot if the you know, the user enters submit multiple times before the previous results have come back You might end up with those sort of things into leaving. Do they know how to handle that? You know, do they know how to handle that in an efficient way? it's a really Basic question. It's something that we Tend to do in our jobs quite a lot fetching some data and displaying it But even to something like this, there are so many layers that you can add to see where the candidates are Yeah, and as and as we mentioned earlier, you can take it down many different paths depending on Where the candidates strengths are which hopefully at this point you've talked to them about if they are, you know More into visualization and you want to see and that's something that you actually need on your team as well Maybe you want to change it up and lead it down that path. Maybe they can visualize the in-progress request or something like that It's nice to have these questions that are flexible and you can bend them a little bit to fit more towards the candidate So you can make the candidate shine at their strengths Absolutely. And once all that's done Say goodbye to the candidates You still got work to do because you need to rate the candidates performance I would say make sure you stick to what happened in the interview This comes into play when the candidate is someone you know Either a friend or like someone of a an online profile that you're aware of Let's say that candidate a performs better than candidate b But you know candidate b and you know, they didn't show their best in the interview and you decide Oh, they're actually better than candidate a right based on some other stuff, you know But maybe candidate a wasn't showing their best either. So it's kind of unfair that you're You know offering that leeway to candidate b and not candidate a I would say if you're unsure Do another round of interviews get them both back in again Also, write your assessment straight afterwards make notes during the interview But write up your conclusions straight away because your memory doesn't get better with time No, it really doesn't And I would also say that's something that I have Experienced and therefore do in my when I interview as well Tell the candidate that you are taking notes because especially right now in a virtual setting It can often seem like You're not paying attention. You're just chatting with your work friends while you're waiting for the candidate to come up with a solution Um, because you know, maybe you're touch typist and you can look the person in the eye while typing I can that to an extent but often especially when it's cody things. I do look at my notes um Yeah, just make sure the candidate knows that you are being respectful and you're listening even if you're not Looking at them and typing. I've been on both sides of the table on that one I've yeah, I felt like I was being ignored because they were just sort of looking away going. Uh-huh tap tap tap tap Uh-huh tap tap tap tap. Yeah, but they're making notes. That's which is the right thing to do Yeah, also agree on a rating system. So each interviewer is scoring the same way that that kind of thing really helps also come to your conclusion before speaking to anyone else who was doing the interview because Group and attitude polarization is a thing They even without you knowing it by talking to someone else your opinion It might even change, but it's more likely to become more extreme. So record your own viewpoint So when you discuss it with other interviewers like you can be persuaded, of course You know, they can say well, I felt this and you could you know adjust your own viewpoint But make sure you have your initial viewpoint and make sure that's heard Yeah, I think in general biases are a thing to be aware of and it can be biases introduced after the interview As you say by talking to other people with without, you know Somehow writing down your conclusion first, but also make sure in the interview to be aware that we as humans Suck at being neutral and open-minded. Usually we see a person We have an opinion somewhere in the subconscious of our brain and it can and most likely will affect How you perceive what they're doing their gender their race Their earrings all of these things can and probably will affect Your evaluation and you need to work hard to not let them influence you and use fair criteria Yeah, and that's really at the root of all of these tips and rules that I've that I've put into this presentation It is is to just try and avoid Bias and avoid unconscious bias as much as possible. It can't be eliminated, but you can avoid it through some of these methods But that's all I've got But it did get me a balloon and it also got me some good teammates as well Well, wow, I'm not sure about that Focus on the documentation and the naming I squeaked while I said that Make notes during the interview, but write up the conclusion straight away because your bedroom I can't speak today. We're so close to the end