Interviewing for the Willingness to Learn
I’ve done quite a few interviews over the past few years, and today I had an epiphany concerning one aspect the interview process (at least my interview process) fails to cover. Mainly, when conducting an interview, I am interested in two things:
1) Does the applicant have enough knowledge/experience on the subject matter of the position.
2) Will the applicant “fit” into our style of doing things.
Looking back over the people we have hired, I realized the one point I have failed to ascertain:
3) How willing/eager is the applicant to learn new things?
You can’t just ask, do you enjoy learning new things, because obviously, everyone will answer yes. The real question is, how willing are you to give up your current understanding of the world and replace it with a new understanding.
This is an important point in computer programming, especially in a language like php, because it is incredibly easy to learn the basics. I’ve met many people over the years who think they are fantastic programmers, when in reality, they churn out unmaintainable code. In almost every case, I feel like they could actually be fantastic programmers, if they would just adhere to some coding standards. I’m not talking about formatting standards here, I could care less if you use camel case, or spaces as tabs, or how you arrange your brackets,or what type of comments you use. I’m talking about simple things like separating business and page logic, avoiding global variables, organizing a folder structure, and avoiding registered global usage.
The problem has been people who think their way is best, and refuse to change. Some topics just aren’t up for debate (and there are plenty of topics that are)!
So how do I even test for such a thing? Is it even possible? One idea I had was to bring some poorly written code to the interview, and ask the interviewee what is wrong with it. But still, that only covers current knowledge, it doesn’t get at the root of the problem.