KWPro.net

I've been through a huge abundance of interviews in my career and find that most end up being these boring exercises in academic nonsense. As a professional of 10+ years, I feel that people end up ignoring my experience in favor of gearing their interviews for students that recently graduated. That's a great process if you want to hire junior level smarties or people that enjoy mental problems, but I feel that a lot of midcareer types like myself have long moved on.

Of course, I'm partly guilty of coming up with interview questions. Some of it are results of my accumulated experience in the industry. However, as I thought about interesting interview questions, one question I thought would be awesome for companies to pose to developers.

It's not really a question, but a way to assess someone creatively and a few other intangibles that you can't immediately receive from your standard academic interviews. The best part is that anyone from any level can handle this interview problem.

As a lover of Lego, I would bring in a part of my collection. The stuff I'd bring in would range from town, castle, space and perhaps a few other themes.  I would bring in the instructions for the sets and proceed to ask the interviewee to provide me three things:

• A finished composition of one of the sets (their choosing)
• A set that isn't part of the instructions (say an airplane, house, hotel, space ship, etc.)
• Their own creation

What this problem reveals in turn are:

• Can a candidate follow basic instructions
• Is a candidate willing to perform such a task that might not be suited for adults
• What the candidate's interest lie (as demonstrated from their choosing of picking between several different genres)
• Their ability to take an abstract idea and formulate a concrete result
• Their creativity

Honestly, this type of interview can be applied to virtually any position. It's really used as a fun, cooldown for the end of the interview process.  It's not meant to be stressful nor difficult, but just taking a universal concept (hopefully most people had the opportunity to build at least one Lego set as a child) and applying it to the interview process.

For development positions, you could take this interview concept a step further by providing a sandboxed environment with some tools (e.g. PHP, perl, Java) and seeing what the candidate could come up with. I think this type of interview process is far more practical than just asking mindless brain teasers and boring tech questions (how many fucking times am I going to be asked the inner vs outer join sql question!?!??!?!?!!?!?!?!)