If I would have to lead a job-interview (what I never had to do before), I would probably ask the following questions:
1) Which (technical) books do you consider as a must read for a software developer?
2) Describe a problem that you solved which is memorable to you / you are proud of.
3) What is you opinion about / have you ever used [UML | OSGi | Ruby | technology xyz] / [continious integration |
unit test | static code analyzer | tool xyz]
A few words why I would ask those questions:
1) Maybe I am a bit old-fashioned about the way how
you should learn something new. But in my opinion books are usually superior than online-tutorials. And I met too many developers who never read a book about software-development because they think you can learn everything from tutorials / forums / etc. That might be true if you want to try out something new and get a quick overview. But to get an overview of the "whole picture" I consider books to be the better choice. Especially those books which have been written by "veterans" and/or can be considered "ageless" (e.g. "Programming Pearls" by Jon Bentley, "The mythical Man-Month" by Frederick Brooks Jr., "Peopleware" by Tom DeMarco, "Code Complete" by Steve McConnell, "Design Patterns" by Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson and John Vlissides, "The pragmatic programmer" by Andrew Hunt & David Thomas... just to name a few).
For me it shows a genuine interest on the subject and the will to become a better programmer. I would consider someone who never read a book on the subject to be someone who writes "hackish" code and only wants to get the job done, without a long-term thinking regarding maintainability. (I know that there will be exceptions, as usually, but I guess those kind of persons are quite rare).
2) It doesn't matter which kind of problem the person will describe. It doesn't have to be rocket-science. But someone who has real passion about what (s)he is talking about has such an excitement in his/her eyes that it's hard to miss. If the person can't think about anything at this question can hardly have any passion about what (s)he's doing.
3) It's not bad if a person never used a technology / tool you are asking about. If I would ask a person about his / her opinion about UML and (s)he replies: "I never used it in any real project because it was inappropriate on the last projects because [project was too small / programming language was not object-oriented / lack of support by management / whatever]" that would be absolutely fine for me because the person has an opionion about it (which implies that the person dealt with it at least in some way with it). If the answer would be: "I never used it because [I don't care / I just want to program / I never heard of it before ]." Or: "I don't have any opinion about it". Those answers would show a lack of interest to broaden the own horizon.
As I've mentioned before, I was never an interviewer. So I can't say with 100% certainty if those questions would work. But I'm quite sure that they would ;-)
