Every year or so I hire new members to my team. As a hiring manager, normally during the interview I don’t ask too many technical questions. That is usually for a follow-up technical interview. Still, I do want to know two things. Does the candidate show knowledge of what they put on their resume? How does the employee handle a technical question they don’t know the answer to? The 2nd part is frankly the more interesting question.

Does the candidate have a network of experts they can pull from? Do they know how to engage open source communities? Are they comfortable jumping into unfamiliar code to understand how it works? I want to hear war stories to better understand how they deal with ambiguity of something new. In the last few years especially from college hires I started getting “I would google it” as an answer. Now that isn’t a horrible answer but you can’t google everything. For instance, Internal projects/services/components will not be answerable via google. Also the answers you find might

This year, I have noticed an increasing number of references to using ChatGPT or Microsoft CoPilot. Often as the first reference used to a problem which has left me with mixed feelings. On one hand, these are wonderful tools. I use IBM watsonx Code Assistant (WCA) at work all the time. I encourage my entire team to use WCA. They should at least use it for generating comments for the code they have written.

Now It can’t be the only tool in your tool chest. It will not have all the answers. This is due to the same reasons I mentioned that Google will not have all the answers. Also some tools like Microsoft CoPilot are still in litigation on the legality of their product. This is fine for working on a school programming assignment but a significant risk to authoring commercial software.

In closing, the best thing for a candidate is to show a breadth of tools & resources to get the job done.