Same here. There's no silver bullet question, and no high pressure situation with me.
My approach has just been to have a conversation, and try to move it along naturally. What do you think of concepts? What useful STL did they add? Why did you go with this design? Ask me something.
If the person doesn't really have the level of interest required, they will run out of things to say. Like a cave left unexplored. The good candidates will go down all the caves with you, even if they don't quite know what's there.
In particular, the times I've had dud hires it was not possible to know from the standard fare of coding questions and IQ questions. When I was doing that obviously the people I hired passed. But for instance one guy really didn't want to be a programmer, he just knew how to answer the questions. He ended up stalling on his first assignment, and eventually decided to change careers. Another dud also lacked motivation, perhaps because he was asked to do something not quite in his area to begin with. He ended up not doing anything at all.
Apart from those two, dozens of others have turned out ok. I never ran into that guy who couldn't do FizzBuzz, despite not asking. I also don't think it was all that bad to let go of the duds within a quarter, they never got so ingrained in the team that we depended on them, and they could plausibly move on to another job without mentioning us on their CV.
I’ve been job searching lately and it is brutal. I’m fairly social normally but interviews terrify me. I freeze up, lose my train of thought and I don’t think my enthusiasm for my work really comes though. It’s probably not as bad as I imagine but it’s really frustrating.
If you will permit me some trite but genuine advice: I have been interviewing and hiring people for well over a decade and it's not much more fun as the interviewer. Just pretend you are having a conversation with a friend about a project you really enjoy. It's kind of like worrying about how you will perform in a race. The training is already done when you show up to the starting line. The race is the easy part. You know what you know, just demonstrate it. Let the chips fall where they may, as they say. If you fall short, so be it. It's kind of the Zen approach to interviews. Don't try to hard, just do what you know how to do and find that place where you can be genuine.
My approach has just been to have a conversation, and try to move it along naturally. What do you think of concepts? What useful STL did they add? Why did you go with this design? Ask me something.
If the person doesn't really have the level of interest required, they will run out of things to say. Like a cave left unexplored. The good candidates will go down all the caves with you, even if they don't quite know what's there.
In particular, the times I've had dud hires it was not possible to know from the standard fare of coding questions and IQ questions. When I was doing that obviously the people I hired passed. But for instance one guy really didn't want to be a programmer, he just knew how to answer the questions. He ended up stalling on his first assignment, and eventually decided to change careers. Another dud also lacked motivation, perhaps because he was asked to do something not quite in his area to begin with. He ended up not doing anything at all.
Apart from those two, dozens of others have turned out ok. I never ran into that guy who couldn't do FizzBuzz, despite not asking. I also don't think it was all that bad to let go of the duds within a quarter, they never got so ingrained in the team that we depended on them, and they could plausibly move on to another job without mentioning us on their CV.