Photo by B Rosen

This one article sums up everything that's wrong with engineering interviews. The author likes to ask potential hires to explain whether you can call delete this within a C++ member function. What's so wrong with that you ask, it seems like fairly standard practice?

I've conducted a lot of interviews, and been on the other side of a few, and from my own experience and the research I know poorly structured interviews like this are a terrible mechanism for predicting how good people will be at performing a job. Just think about this interview question for a second; how much time in your coding job do you typically spend worrying about this sort of C++ trivia versus debugging, trying to understand legacy code, talking to other engineers, figuring out requirements, explaining your project to managers, etc, etc? The right answer for me is "I've no clue, looks like a terrible idea generally, but I'd google it if needed."

The reason these sort of questions keep coming up is the same reason the drunk kept looking under the lamp post for his keys, they're within the comfort zone of technical specialists, even though the answers aren't useful. For a long time, I did the same, even though I was frustrated with the results. Finally I received some official training at Apple, and what they taught me opened my eyes!

You can find a more detailed description here, but the most important part is "Ask about past behavior". It's the best predictor of future performance, and if you ask in the right way it's also very hard to for the candidate to exaggerate or lie. You can do something general like "Tell me about your worst project", but something more specific is even better, I'd often use "Tell me about a time you hit a graphics driver bug". The candidates will start off with a superficial overview, but if you follow up with more detailed questions (eg "So, did you handle talking to Nvidia?") you'll start to build a real picture of their role and behavior, and it's almost impossible to fake that level of detail.

If C++ experience is crucial, then a much better question would be "Tell me about a time you had to debug a template issue" or "Tell me about a project you implemented using reference-counted objects". Anybody who's read enough C++ books can answer the original question, but these versions will tell you who's actually spent time in the trenches.