In nurse education they sometimes talk about the triplet “skill, knowledge, attitude” towards patient safety [1]. In the development world, we can be quite good with evaluating skills and knowledge, but how about evaluating and talking about constructive attitudes?

Been part of setting up a hiring pipeline before, with some exercises in OOP design given to the participants, which should be discussed during the interview. A separate interview focused on behavioural aspects and general fitness in the team.

Attitudes I’d like to avoid:

  • Dogmatism, rigid thinking
  • Perfectionism, unable to make hard prioritizations
  • Passive, blames others
  • Overly independent, taking big risks without discussions

Attitudes to prefer:

  • Adaptive
  • Open and curious
  • Assertive, not agressive or passive

Attitude towards certain topics:

  • Object-oriented programming
  • Functional programming
  • Code quality
  • Unit testing
  • Static types
  • Coperation
  • Deadlines
  • Mistakes made previously

What does it mean to be adaptive?

What does it mean to be open and curious?

What does it mean to be assertive?

TODO

We don’t care about values?

This is just a behavioural part of an interview? [2]

This is no respecting the applicants time.

Risk aware?

Just culture.

“Tools in a belt vs religion.”

“How do you validate the correctness of code snippets generated by an AI assistant?”

“A critical feature needs to ship in two hours, but the unit tests are failing. What is your move?”

“How do you handle a Pull Request review that requests a total rewrite of your logic?”

“Who is responsible for the quality of the code once it reaches production?”

“Tell me about a technology you changed your mind about in the last year.”

“You’re nearing a deadline, but your code has a known edge-case bug that’s unlikely to affect users immediately.”

“A product manager gives you vague requirements for a feature.”

“In your view, what makes code ‘self-documenting’ versus requiring external docs?”

“A junior developer is consistently making the same mistake. How do you intervene?”

Source

[1] https://www.qsen.org/competencies-pre-licensure-ksas

[2] https://hiredevelopers.com/behavioural-interview-questions-software-developer/