The Domain Expertise Interview

You’ll recall that we hire ability, not just knowledge. But we do expect candidates to have some current knowledge in their fields. (It’s definitely a red flag if the candidate shows a complete lack of expertise in any relevant domain.)

Also, understanding what a candidate has learned in the past can help indicate what he or she is capable of learning in the future.

• Find out how they acquired their domain expertise. E.g., “what technical area have you learned about most recently, why did you need to learn it, and how did you learn it?”
• If you’re going to ask about quirks of a particular environment, be certain that those quirks are ones that any engineer would absolutely have to know to be successful in that environment. (Coding is not a trivia contest. That’s what we have Google for. And Stack Overflow.)
• “I don’t know exactly, but here’s how I’d find the answer” is often a perfectly good response to a domain-specific question.
• Does their knowledge cover a breadth of domains (tools, programming languages, environments, etc.)? Have they shown a consistent history of picking up new domains? These are some of the best predictors of a candidate’s ability to succeed.

Next: Craftsmanship Interviews