Engineer Interview technique?

Came across this blog by Joe Kraus about the three questions that he uses during interviews to see whether or not the candidate is a good engineer.

Here are my answers to his three questions:

Do you have a blog?

Yes. This one.

What is your homepage?

http://www.google.com/ig

Do you contribute to an open source project?

Uhm I guess. I'm a contributor of the webinject project.

So based on my answers, I only satisfied 2 out of 3 criteria. Am I a horrible engineer now?

I'm not quite sure how he thought he could determine whether or not someone is a good engineer based on these three questions. It sounds like he just wants to hire introvert that fall under the "geeks" category. While I'm not saying that geeky people are either good or bad engineers, it does make me believe that the author is extremely narrow-minded, in such a way that he thinks only geeks make good engineers.

So I got an idea for you, Joe. Why don't you simplify your three questions into just a yes or no question: Are you a geek?

Building a successful engineering team requires people of different personalities and backgroud. I can care less whether or not you like to blog outside of work. I care a lot more about what you know, your aptitude to learn, and your passion about your work.

When I interview people for my team, I don't look for specialists; Rather, I look for generalists who seem to enjoy a broad range of subjects and technologies. Specialists can be a quick win in the beginning for your company, but the technologies that he/she knows will become obsolete very quickly anyway. On the other hand, generalists are those who enjoy going out and trying out new technologies. They usually do a much better job at evaluating and choosing the right technology for a project, rather than just sticking to a specific one just because they specialize in it.

The next thing I do is try to give them a fairly open ended question and see how the candidate analyzes it. If the candidate gets stuck, I usually ask them to make a few logical guesses before giving him/her more hints. This way, it tells me whether or not the candidate has great analytical skills and whether or not the candidate is a quick learner.

Much of my interviewing style was adopted from Joel's Guerrilla Guide to Interviewing. For those that are interested in figuring out a good way of finding the right candidate for your team, this is an excellent read.