| Do they respect people notwithstanding their position or their technical ability? There are many candidates who will talk down to people who are not technical. One way to detect that is to either have non technical people during the interview ask questions, or not clearly identify that you are technical if you're in a managerial position. Just a human. Does the candidate respect you. Will they explain things to you? This is not frivolous. An engineer, especially in a startup, will have to talk with non-technical people (board, advisors, clients, etc). If they have that "attitude", you want to know that before you hire them and make your decision accordingly. How do they deal with vulnerability, or being wrong, or someone else being wrong? You can be deliberately wrong about something you really know, and then be wrong about something they really know. Will they go along? Will they correct you and elevate you without having a smug attitude? You want to know that. Again, this is not some "mind kung fu" frivolous thing. Especially in a start-up, people spend a lot of time testing hypotheses, and often being wrong. You don't want an asshole there. You also don't want someone hiding evidence. If they bullshit you on something you really know because they thought you knew nothing of it, they will do it when you really don't know about the thing that was messed up. You'll have people during an incident doing everything to cover their ass, instead of actually giving all the information needed to fix the issue and stabilize systems. Even when we hired an accountant, I had a list of questions to elicit these behaviors. In one instance, it became evident that we'll have a problem even asking a question to that accountant. We had that with some engineering candidates who had attitudes like "Do I also have to explain this to you?", or when you claim you don't really know a lot about a topic, they see this as an opportunity to bullshit. Besides the ethical considerations of them doing that (or you doing that), it demonstrates low general intelligence to do that in a hiring interview. |