The Agile Interview
Oh I've sat a lot of interviews. I've had technical questions and whiteboarding sessions, done team activities (building towers out of paper? or a lego resort?) and given presentations. I've even been asked to write C++ with pen and paper. And sometimes I've been the one doing the interviewing.
Stephen Moffitt of We Are Atmosphere and I were looking for a couple of Developers. We were both convinced Agilists. Not specifically Scrum or XP or any of the other methods. People who believe that the 4 Values and 12 Principles of the Agile Manifesto summarise real wisdom about software delivery. So we were keen to find Developers who could collaborate with others, and above all with each other. Who'd really augment the team and work well together. We both knew plenty of interviewing tricks1 from both sides of the table, but we were looking for something slightly different. We didn't just want people who could code well. We wanted people who would code well together.
So we shook it up a bit. We had two interviewees. We had conversations with each of them. Then we ran a live coding test. For both of them at the same time. Together. We weren't really interested in the quality of the code they turned out – we trusted their PHP chops. We wanted to see them collaborating.
And as they worked at it, the two of us sat there nudging each other and giggling! Because they were working really well together.
The outcome was fascinating. One of them was a dead cert for the job. No question about it. The other, if we'd interviewed him on his own would have been, 50/50. But seeing them work together – I mean we wanted a team, and here were two guys who'd never seen each other before and immediately settled into a groove.
We took them both on without hesitation and they worked together fantastically.
We called it the Agile Interview. Devised out of an aim to build a collaborative Agile team rather than looking for superstar individuals.
10/10. Would recommend.