I am not against it at all. It opens the conversation to some technical aspects that can be very intersesting to talk about.
As a candidate I love getting technical in interviews because It allows me to see how my prospective manager thinks. If we have radically different ways of taking care of a technical problem it's a red flag for me.
In the same area, I like the "let's talk about your last project" question too.
So, I've had my share of technical interviews and here what I observed :
I am usually unable to produce good software when the specs I'm supposed to use are not precise enough. I don't mean not complete enough. I mean not precise enough.
Be it on the job or in interviews I seriously question the ability of some interviewers to produce good technical interview questions.
By good I mean precise, using the right vocabulary.
I do not mean complete. You can knowingly give an incomplete spec to the candidate to see what kind of questions he/she would ask to try and get the whole picture. (or if he/she goes head first into an unsolvable problem)
But the details that are given need to be explained in precise terms. Not in a shadowy weird dialect based on a model that only the interviewer understand.
I've had my share of technical interviews and most of my fail attempts at live coding were due to (my lack of skill but also) questions not precise enough or misusing technical terms (sometimes even not grammatically correct questions).
The latter usually make me feel awkward because I wonder if those interviewers simply lack the minimum intelligence to explain a simple feature with precise words.
Good engineers I have worked with always use precise words to describe precise concepts. Using wrong or imprecise vocabulary is proof of a lack of understanding of the job and/or a will to try and sound "smart" or "tech-savvy" to compensate for some kind of inferiority complex.
So maybe a good advice to interviewers would be : technical questions on interviews yes. But good technical questions.
It's kind of amusing you spend a lot of time trying to define the work precise. =) I understand what you mean though.
Have you ever considered that part of this is hoping that interviewees will ask questions seeking more precision? A lot of times on the job, you don't get such precision. There are unknowns you have to answer for yourself, and sometimes the right questions are more important than the technical approach.
That's why I insisted on the difference beetween imprecise and incomplete.
> I do not mean complete. You can knowingly give an incomplete spec to the candidate to see what kind of questions he/she would ask to try and get the whole picture. (or if he/she goes head first into an unsolvable problem)
I feel that using wrong technical vocabulary in a question is not a sign of a interviewer trying to make the candidate ask questions. Maybe it's just me.
I am not against it at all. It opens the conversation to some technical aspects that can be very intersesting to talk about.
As a candidate I love getting technical in interviews because It allows me to see how my prospective manager thinks. If we have radically different ways of taking care of a technical problem it's a red flag for me.
In the same area, I like the "let's talk about your last project" question too.
So, I've had my share of technical interviews and here what I observed :
I am usually unable to produce good software when the specs I'm supposed to use are not precise enough. I don't mean not complete enough. I mean not precise enough.
Be it on the job or in interviews I seriously question the ability of some interviewers to produce good technical interview questions.
By good I mean precise, using the right vocabulary.
I do not mean complete. You can knowingly give an incomplete spec to the candidate to see what kind of questions he/she would ask to try and get the whole picture. (or if he/she goes head first into an unsolvable problem)
But the details that are given need to be explained in precise terms. Not in a shadowy weird dialect based on a model that only the interviewer understand.
I've had my share of technical interviews and most of my fail attempts at live coding were due to (my lack of skill but also) questions not precise enough or misusing technical terms (sometimes even not grammatically correct questions).
The latter usually make me feel awkward because I wonder if those interviewers simply lack the minimum intelligence to explain a simple feature with precise words.
Good engineers I have worked with always use precise words to describe precise concepts. Using wrong or imprecise vocabulary is proof of a lack of understanding of the job and/or a will to try and sound "smart" or "tech-savvy" to compensate for some kind of inferiority complex.
So maybe a good advice to interviewers would be : technical questions on interviews yes. But good technical questions.