I got around to emailing some pre-interview questions to a job candidate today, something I’ve been meaning to do for a few years now. And while a simple questionnaire has limited value, I was able to dive into a few of his responses and learn the basics about him quickly.

In my limited sample so far, it’s far more useful than phone screening: it fills in holes in a resumé, uncovers basic preferences and dispositions, and proves if the candidate can write coherently.¹ I’ll have to try this on a few more people, and see if it’s as useful for other personality types.

By the way, if you’re an über-talented PHP developer looking for work around Vancouver, B.C, send me your resumé, CV, or a link to your portfolio site.

1. Or convince someone to write on their behalf ↩

An interview with the architect of IE 7. The best question? Why is IE 7 more bloated (15MB) than FireFox (6Mb)?

An interesting, longish interview with Mr. Iwata (president of Nintendo), which focuses mostly on how problems and solutions cluster in counter-intuitive ways.

An interview with Richard Hipp (author of the SQLite library) at The Guardian. I’ve used SQLite for several projects now, and am very impressed.

Bob Garfield asks Bill Gates about the Mac versus PC ads, and Gates ends the interview. The juicy excerpt:

GARFIELD: I want to ask you one more thing: Those Mac ads — how do you feel about the John Hodgman character?

GATES: I can’t comment on someone else’s ad.

GARFIELD: OK … but he’s you.

GATES: Yeah, I’m not gonna comment on someone else’s ad.

GARFIELD: OK, well, Bill Gates, thank you so much for joining us.

(Silence)

GARFIELD: Can I just have a clean goodbye?

(Silence)

GARFIELD: OK, can you just say goodbye? Thank you or goodbye or something like that?

GATES: Goodbye.

Many programmers can’t program. My experience of interviewing developers isn’t quite so grim (but the programming problem he poses is an interesting filter).

A large set of interviews with various Wii system developers, via kottke.

A longish interview with Joel Spolsky as part of the recently released Founders at work book.

An interview with Allan Odgaard, creator of Textmate for Mac.

An interesting multi-page interview with John Carmack and Todd Hollenshead.