I interviewed someone today whose hobby was poetry of the African diasporia, for a position relative to logistics.

While I know very little about that specific poetic oeuvre, hearing them talk about their passion gave me an insight into their personality.

Perhaps ask questions about what they’re into rather than if they’re into thing.

When dating people, I often ask “name a book that’s not Harry Potter”. Doesn’t even have to be one you’ve read. Pick any book at all (other than Harry Potter) and tell me why you thought of it.

I’m not gatekeeping people who do or don’t read books, and i don’t care if it’s sci fi, fantasy, fanfic, nonfic, whatever. what i do care about is that you are aware of at least one book and care enough to remember what it’s about. That’s a low bar, but not as low as you might think.

The “no Harry Potter” clause isn’t specifically due to jkr being a terf (although that too), but because it’s such an overused answer. Yeah, I do remember the books that were so popular that they had their own brand of jelly beans. I have run out of things to say about them. Pick literally anything else.

I grew up coding but don’t read sci-fi. You need to expand your idea on what a good motived coder looks like. It sounds like you’re in a bubble.

I speak casually but my aim is just to find out if they have the technical skills necessary for the role. I find little social things come up by happenstance.

This doesn’t correlate with good developers at all in my experience. If I was to ask one question it would be “tell me about your passion project” or “What’s the last thing you nerded out on?”

Maybe just ask them if they have read anything interesting lately ?

No. What? No.

Unless you publish sci-fi novels as a business, I suppose. Then maybe. But no.

I don’t have anything against “culture fit”, but that means that if you think someone will make your life miserable by sharing a space for eight hours it’s okay to go with someone else. It’s not a blank check to audit people’s Spotify histories. Job interviews aren’t dates.

This seems terrible.

• Weeds out a lot of people since half of Americans don’t read books at all.

Is that always a good thing? What about people who don’t read much but listen to audiobooks and go to the theatre a lot?

• Theoretically filters out people who love this kind of tech subculture from people who are just in it for the money

One of the best programmers I ever worked with was ‘in it for the money’. He was what Goldman Sachs used to call ‘long term greedy’ though which meant he had an eye on the success of the project above and beyond his own responsibilities and his own code. That’s why he was one of the best programmers.

The fact that you even weighed the pros and cons of your proposal puts you light years ahead of most hiring managers.

I never got super into sci-fi; it just wasn’t my cuppa. I was always on the fantasy side of things with regard to fiction, being heavily into D&D and many of the novels around the various settings and characters. Edit: I’ve been a developer since the mid aughts and alternately worked in tech and other jobs before that. I wrote my first programs in basic around 9 or 10 when dad gave me something to do to keep out of his hair.

I would try to leave it more open-ended when asking what their hobbies are outside of work, and then ask whatever follow-up questions you can think of that would let them express what they’re passionate about.

My dad designed jet engines and nobody made him design a jet engine on the whiteboard. So you are starting from the right place.

We are here where we are today because we spent too much time thinking that acting like the right kind of nerd meant you were a good programmer. There’s nothing wrong with going to a job, working hard, and then doing something else. I know very productive engineers who don’t have a favorite science fiction book who were great to work with.

Given things lately, I think it’s healthy that a lot of people have had to take a step back and realize that their employer would totally harvest their organs for profit if they could get away with it. Providing people the right “tech subculture” cues has resulted in a lot of people working themselves to death and never seeing any income windfalls.

I actively hate a bunch of my old science fiction books from when I was a kid because they were written with what is, to my adult mind, a not-very-subtle fascist bent. There’s, obviously, some great novels out there that expand your mind … but at the same time, there’s a lot of the science fiction canon where I’d probably hate working with people who took those books seriously.

And, likewise, there’s a lot of people who simply don’t have time because they are smart people actually trying to get into the lucrative field of computer science and a good scifi novel reading session is a luxury they just don’t have.

“Tell me about your favorite science fiction book” is pretty much a textbook case for how to have good intentions but conduct an interview that’s, when you step back and think about it some more, biased. It’s checking for subculture-fit in ways that have nothing to do with how they are at work.

On the other hand, whiteboard tests are also useless.

If you want to make a better interview, I’d suggest you have an interview guide. Not a manager? Just write your own for your interviews and keep to it. This protects you from unconsciously giving the person who looks the part easy questions.

If you want to check for culture fit, talk about things at work that matter. Are you worried someone is going to talk down to a junior engineer? Make them talk about a time they had to mentor a junior engineer. Did they succeed? What did they do? Ask them about the best project manager or doc writer they worked with. Are you worried that they aren’t serious enough about getting shit done at work? Talk about the worst incident they ever were part of, but not the technical parts, just how they made sure it got fixed. Are you worried that they aren’t a good team player? Ask about their best collaborations. Or how they organized work on a large project. Or the time that they took one for the team. If you think through how the last crop of yuppies pissed you off for a while and break it down into questions that they’d not have a good answer to, you should be able to make a nice set of behavioral screening questions and a set of attributes that you want the person to display in their answers.

I see what you’re getting at, but maybe broaden it to just their favorite book. I also certainly wouldn’t disqualify based on not having read books (sci-fi or otherwise), because maybe they read short stories online, or maybe comics or something similar.

If you have the authority to try to make a good company culture; hell yes you should. Even if they don’t often read novels, or they read something other than sci-fi, it’ll help you understand their personality and weed out people who suck. If someone says they prefer reading sci-fi manga or playing fantasy ttrpgs or any other possible nerdy thing they are probably leagues better than a ladder climbing type.There are plenty of places for a soulless corpo to go work for, if you can keep them away from you and yours you’ll have a much better and healthier company and (more importantly) life in the long run.

I like to ask candidates to tell me about a design pattern, or a framework, or a coding principle that they really appreciate and which changed how they think about or write code. It’s an open-ended way to show me they care about the craft.

People who find the field interesting and somewhat fun (AKA not just lucrative) usually have these kinds of preferences or paradigm-shifting moments / learnings. People who can’t come up with anything for this question tend to be real junior or just in it for the wrong reasons. Or so I tell myself, anyway.