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Joe Kraus, founder of JotSpot and Excite, posted a little entry on his blog about three questions that should be asked at an interview for an engineer.  These are not questions about technical skills as a programmer.  These are questions to find out about intangibles.  Those being communicating, tinkering and passion for coding

Without future ado here are the three questions:

1) Do you have a blog?

2) What’s your home page?

3) Do you contribute to an open source project?

The first question helps answer the need to know how well the person communicates.  A person with a blog obviously does have the ability to communicate their ideas.  They’ve taken the time to publicly write and express. 

The second question shows if the person is a tinkerer or not.  This might seem kind of odd but it does make logical sense.  If the person makes their own custom home page, as opposed to just using yahoo or some other portal site, it shows they are not satisfied unless they get their hands dirty and do things better. 

The final question is a way to test for passion.  A person that takes time to work on a open source project shows they aren’t into coding just for the money.  Not to say people that want to get paid to code are bad.  On the contrary!  It’s just a good way to find a real geek/coder vs. someone that became a programmer because they heard in high school/college that computers were a great industry to make money.

You know Joe might just be onto something here!  I’ve done plenty of interviews and in so many of them they do nothing but ask the usual generic questions.  Tell us about yourself, where do you want to be in five years, how well do you deal with stress, do you like working in groups or alone, etc, etc.  There’s nothing wrong with these questions but they’re standard fair that they really don’t tell you much about a person really.  As far as how well the person will actually do their job.

Well here are my answers just for the record.

1) Yes I have a blog.  You’re reading it right now!

2) My homepage is custom made.  You can see the sanitized version here (I removed any links that could cause security and/or privacy issues)

3) Well I don’t contribute any code to open source projects but I do follow several very closely including FreeBSD, Subversion, Haiku(openbeos) and SQLite.  I monitor mailing lists daily to keep updated on them.