Ask HN: I'm going to interview my possible next manager, any tips?

5 points·elai··3 comments

I'm a developer who's going to interview the lead dev for my team in a couple of days. I've never really interviewed much before, and other than giving him technical trivia, testing to see if he has passion for software development, and if we would get along, what should I ask? What would you wished you had done or could of tested in your possible manager to be?

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Both my current and previous managers have been excellent for one overarching reason: they each understood that developers are individual artists of a sort and are not interchangeable gears. This fact may seem obvious to HNers but if you've ever worked within a larger organization, you know how quickly this jewel of wisdom is often forgotten. Knowing where the interviewee stands on this point will be priceless for your whole team.

Peer coding, coding tests and anything else you can do to evaluate actual technical skills. At the "small team" level, most leaders still drive their teams simply by being better developers that the other guys.

Interpersonal, leadership and operational skills only become critical at higher levels (they are of course great to have at all levels if you are lucky).

Ask him hypotetical questions, ie. what would be your reaction that some of product managers come and say that you have critical bug that needs to be fixed NOW, and all other developers are not availaible (eg. weekend)...

That should help you to undestand how that person is thinking, and how will he react in different stressfull situations.

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