Behavioral Interview Questions for Programmers
What are behavioral interview questions?
Behavioral interview questions are questions that focus on how you've handled different work situations in the past to reveal your personality, abilities and skills. - indeed.com
As part of any interview process a portion of it should be learning the candidates personality traits and how they will interact with peers. Here I present a few questions, for programming roles, along with their reasoning. Framed with the context of having prior work on technical teams. These do not work if it is their first programming role.
I believe their answers will provide character insight and that these questions can not be gamed by knowing them beforehand. Additionally by being open ended you create an oppurtunity for the candidate to guide the conversation. It is essentialy that an interviewee is doing a large portion of the speaking during an interview.
When asking these questions you should be actively listening and asking follow up questions as they answer. This should strike a natural conversational flow. If you find you do not have additional questions typically this means you were not listening well enough or the candidate was reserved with their response.
While listening you should be thinking about the question reason and trying to gain a clear takeaway opinion from their response. There are no right or wrong answers. Just, hopefully, insight into whether this is someone you would work well with and why or why not.
Tell me about something interesting one of your colleagues built?
Checks for narcissistic tendencies. Team is more than them. Are they paying attention to the team/company.
Tell me about a company choice you disagreed with?
Shows how they think and communicate about their employer. How did they deal with it. How do they handle disagreements.
Tell me about a time when you had to work an extremely late night? Was it necessary or avoidable?
Shows expectations around time. What type of culture they want. Critical evaluation of the events around them.
Tell me about a time that you witnessed a company technical disaster?
What scale of disasters have they been exposed too. How do the deal with it. Under pressure are they extreme positive or negative.