From the course: Tech Career Skills: Interviewing Developers

Technical skills and soft skills

From the course: Tech Career Skills: Interviewing Developers

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Technical skills and soft skills

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- I've already noted that you need to evaluate a candidate based on both technical skills and soft skills. Before we get to the specific questions to ask, in this chapter, we'll see how those questions fit into the overall interview process. I don't have to convince you to worry about technical skills, of course, developers who interview candidates almost always zero right in on technical skills. However, soft skills are just as important and they sometimes don't get enough attention. I've mentioned that a major benefit of good interviews is longer retention of the people on your team. I think soft skills are just as important to long-term retention as technical skills. Can they communicate well? Do they have the right attitude to fit a team? Are they open about their mistakes? If they lack soft skills, they have much higher risk of early departure, or may not be able to communicate what they're doing effectively. They might be a great coder, but if they're arrogant, hard to work with, and create dissension on your team, you don't want them around. Probing their soft skills can help you avoid bringing on unsuitable candidates in the first place. If they lack the soft skills needed, you'll usually see warning signs during their interview. They might show contempt for users and seem to regard them as a necessary evil. Some developers seem to think everything that goes wrong is somebody else's fault, they're highly reluctant to admit mistakes and take responsibility for them. The negative characteristic I see most often, and one that I think is highly correlated with poor developers is defensiveness. This is poison to a development effort. Mistakes don't get exposed and corrected when they should be. It can also lead to blaming the wrong person for a problem and lead to resentment and team friction. Some of the questions I'll suggest later in the course are specifically designed to probe for defensiveness. But you should also be prepared to look for it in just about anything you ask.

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