Three interview questions for developers. Soft skills.
Tags: career
Published: 2019-08-03 17:10:22

I won’t talk about technical skills, I want to focus on soft skills and share 3 questions I’m using on the final interview with developers. It is not a typical question as I need to deeply understand the candidate, his emotions and the true reason for his decisions.

I selected 3 fundamental aspects:
- motivation
- how widely he can look at things
- discipline

With the proper level of motivation, constant refill of his personal energy and discipline, the rest is already a matter of technology. The most difficult part of the interview is to find the right question to make sure the candidate will answer sincerely

**Motivation**
Question about 5 offers. It can additionally be made closer to reality if you find out how many companies the candidate is interviewing. No matter what, quantity is important.

So imagine the situation. All 5 companies have made a job offer. They are all different - in terms of money, team, scale, tasks, legacy code, technology, etc. Basically, you understand that they are good and you are satisfied. You need to choose from. And then…you call on all 5 offers and refuse. You call your current company and say: “Guys, I realized that I want to spend the next 5 years with you, I do not want to leave. " What happened to the company or you that you decided to change your mind?

The first reaction to this question is usually this: “Oh, wow. An interesting question, let me think”. The candidate plunges into deep thought for a few minutes. It is directly visible how the brain works.

Typically, developers work for 2-3 years in one place, rarely more, so the remark about 5 years is very powerful. The candidate focuses on those details that are critically important to him, those that are the root cause of dismissal. Correction of them should lead to the fact that a person does not want to quit. That’s how you can find the true motivation why he wants to leave the company and realize if your company has the same problems or not.

**Widely**
I have always considered it crucial that a person has hobbies. Not only in development, but this is also insanely fascinating activity, but also in other areas. Everyone has them. Even the most introvert developer has hobbies (plays computer games, watches particular TV shows, goes to the gym, maybe something else). 

Here is the question to find it.

I ask how many years of experience in IT. For example, 7 years. Let's imagine that the developers have disappeared and are no longer needed in the world. Robots can write code and develop complex products. Moreover, everything, absolutely all other professions remained. What would you do? Or you can describe in a slightly different way that you have the opportunity to exchange your 7 years of experience in IT for 7 years of experience in any other industry, such as surgery or sales or design. What will be your choice?

The candidate must explain his choice. How did he decide to become a doctor? Why doctor? Often candidates share details about an interesting thing from Medtech, construction building, etc. They read articles about it, learn it just for themselves, it helps them to switch from complex programming questions to something else. It is just interesting, it is fun for many of them. It allows them to restore energy and be more productive. 

**Discipline**
The most important thing. Lack of talent is offset by discipline and performance. Lack of discipline is not compensated by anything. Discipline is the ability to follow the agreements that you gave and agreements you accepted as a team, even if you don’t agree.

In order to understand this aspect, I ask the candidate to tell stories when he did not agree with the team, but made a decision and respected it. Disagree & Commit. Conversely, find cases when he violated his own commits. It happens to everyone, it is important that these cases are not frequent.

But even despite the simple answer to this question, it is necessary to dig the reasons. Even if a person did not comply with the team’s decision, there could be a hundred reasons for this and it’s important to find the only one due to which everything happened. Maybe he did not trust people? Maybe he was sure of his innocence and proved it by deed, working overtime? Maybe he thought it was simply not important?  It shows you weaknesses you need to know about the candidate, about his true ability to work with people. Always dig into the reasons to build the whole picture.