summary: ask the open ended question ‘what was the most recent interesting project in which you were heavily involved?’ and then focus most of your technical questions on the system the then describe. If a programmer can’t talk throughly about a topic which they chose themselves and are purportedly very interested, they probably aren’t right for the job (at whatever company I’m working for anyway!)
The benefits are that you wont be randomly hitting a gap in their knowledge, you get a better idea of what they feel are their greatest strengths, and because you can raise your expectations about the quality of their answer you can probe very deeply and find out how good they are at communicating, and whether they are actually blagging.
The problems you can encounter are: they might end up running the interview if you aren't careful; you must be very engaged and perhaps talk about things you aren't that knowledgable yourself, and it is harder to compare one candidate with another (which is VERY important at large companies where you must justify your decisions to HR)
summary: ask the open ended question ‘what was the most recent interesting project in which you were heavily involved?’ and then focus most of your technical questions on the system the then describe. If a programmer can’t talk throughly about a topic which they chose themselves and are purportedly very interested, they probably aren’t right for the job (at whatever company I’m working for anyway!)
The benefits are that you wont be randomly hitting a gap in their knowledge, you get a better idea of what they feel are their greatest strengths, and because you can raise your expectations about the quality of their answer you can probe very deeply and find out how good they are at communicating, and whether they are actually blagging.
The problems you can encounter are: they might end up running the interview if you aren't careful; you must be very engaged and perhaps talk about things you aren't that knowledgable yourself, and it is harder to compare one candidate with another (which is VERY important at large companies where you must justify your decisions to HR)