The art of asking questions
summary
Asking concrete questions changes hiring and debugging: a posted 100+ questions list and an online Q&A link aim to make interviews collaborative, a Twitter poll reports 14% ask none and 68% ask 1–5 questions. Examples are specific: ask about moving to Scala 2:13 or Dotty, or whether performance tests and canary deployments exist. A production outage caused by an enum values() creating a multi‑MB set leads to adding perf tests and canaries, which prevents repeats.
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chapters (34)
- 0:00Introduction
- 7:15Joel Spolsky
- 8:02Technical details
- 10:17Moving to Scala
- 11:29Oncall rotations
- 13:59Poll
- 16:52My first interview
- 17:51If you are interviewer
- 22:09What questions to ask
- 25:22Collaboration
- 25:52Feedback
- 26:21Confidence
- 26:54Dorothys story
- 29:46Bad critique
- 33:14Good critique
- 34:16Push back into production
- 35:13Roll it back
- 37:58Dont use enumeration
- 41:24Trustful and sincere
- 41:59One important thing
- 42:22Why
- 45:23Short Recommendation
- 46:02Retrospective
- 47:05Recommendations
- 47:18Networking
- 48:08First name
- 48:22Come prepared
- 49:22Listen
- 51:39Ask for help
- 52:01Example
- 52:47Metrics
- 53:14Visualization tools
- 54:10Building cities
- 55:26Takeaway
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