Don’t forget soft skills when interviewing engineers

This is based entirely on personal experience, but I thought it might be useful to others. Tech companies tends to do highly technical interviews in engineering and overlook the soft skills. Over the years, when I’ve been given the freedom to do so, I tend to focus more on soft skills. Here are some things I often ask. There really aren’t right and wrong answers, but it’s more about how they handle what is thrown at them.

How do you think code should be tested?

Here I’m generally looking for a few things:

• Recognition that having only engineers testing their own code is not adequate. If they think it is, I will usually point out that if you know how your code works, it might be hard to stumble upon bugs. Then I see how they respond.

• Familiarity with the different types of testing and their strengths and weaknesses. For example, engineer testing, unit tests, manual testing, and automated testing.

• Understanding that all testing cannot be entirely automated. If they think it is, I will point o…