These are my favorite interview questions. They don’t include coding problems, at all. You can learn that stuff better from interviewcake.com than from me anyway. 🙂
Tell me about a particularly difficult problem you solved recently – technical or not. Give me the gory details.
^ I ask a lot of probing questions based on the answer.
What accomplishment in your career or life are you most proud of? Tell me about a professional mistake you made recently, one with consequences, and how you resolved it.
^ I’m most interested in the topics chosen for both of these. I am way more impressed with answers that involve social consequences. It indicates a lack of empathy to me when the answer is 100% technical. But some interviewers are more interested in the technical answers. You have to ask yourself both what are they looking for, and what kind of place you want to work? I always give the more human-centered answers to these questions, which IME weeds out asshole employers as well as the questions weed out asshole employees when I’m the one asking.
The following is a question I only ask for leadership roles:
How do you handle leading a team member who does not want to play by the rules?
^ I’m looking for folks who are all-carrot, no-stick. Again, I’ve found answering this myself with all-carrot has weeded out awful potential employers.
Back to general technical interview questions:
Do you have any code you’ve written which you could share with me, and walk me through the design & reasoning?
^ This is not a deal-breaker if not. The past N years my work has been closed-source, protected by NDAs, and I’ve had to carve out time to write stuff to share for interviews. It’s exhausting and not everyone has the time.
Another from @dyoder: