How to Interview Engineers 📋

Picking speed vs quality, what skills to select for, and a round-up of the most popular interview styles.

Hey there! This article closes our series on hiring engineers. It’s our third piece — in the first two we covered respectively:

• ✨ Hiring Principles for 2025 — three ideas that guide the way I think about hiring these days.

• 🎒 Nailing your Onboarding Developer Experience — a guest article by Dana Lawson, CTO of Netlify, that covers how to write great job descriptions, how to onboard engineers, and how to set up tooling and metrics.

So, today we are wrapping it up by talking about how to interview engineers.

This is an ever-hot topic. People have debated good vs bad interviews for as long as I can remember, but over the past two years things have changed a lot, thanks to a trend you may have heard of: AI.

In fact:

• 🔍 On a tactical level — AI tools forced hiring managers to rethink the effectiveness of several hiring devices, from take-home assignments to cover letters.

• 🔭 On a strategic level — AI is shifting the type of skills that truly matter, so you need to ask yourself: what should I select engineers for?

Today we will address both, starting from first principles, and going down to real-world stories of the interview processes run by some of the tech leaders I respect the most.

So here is the agenda:

• ⚔️ Speed vs Quality — how to navigate the infamous tradeoff.

• 🪴 Select for the unlearnable skills — mentor what you can; hire what you can’t.

• 💼 Make interviews mimic real work — how to design interviews that closely resemble your actual environment.

• 📋 Round-up of interview methods — discussing LeetCodes, take-home’s, case studies, code reviews, and behaviorals!

Let’s dive in!

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