What’s your first question when Pair Programming for a job interview?

As an interviewer using Pair Programming when interviewing potential candidates, apart from the warm-up chatting what’s the first formal question you will ask and what kind of reply are you expecting? I want to share my opinion.

Several years ago I read a book written by Weinberg [1986], which lists three main obstacles to innovation: self-blindness, the No-Problem Syndrome (NPS), and the single-solution belief. During the past decade I have coorperated with a lot of developers, and to my surprise many of them unfortunatly were infected by NPS.

The symptom of NPS is that if you talk with somebody about a problem or task or something difficult they will quickly reply: “No problem” without even thinking it over.

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Usually this kind of team member is not a good pair. In my experience they never realize potential risks and are not willing to investigate the requirements. They cannot provide excellent solutions which satisfy the client and they are often hard to communicate with.

NPS is like a sickness, and the problem may not be recognized by, and is bad for the patient as well as the organization. I have seen so many young people who show no interest at all in their current project. Instead they always think they can learn nothing from current project since there is “no problem”. So instead they will spend time learning C# while working on a JEE project and their interest will turn again to Java after joining a .Net project.

According to both Weinberg’s book and my experience, it is impossible to find a apt and specific way to cure this disease; it requires time, experience, and the wisdom that comes with age.

Fortunately Weinberg provides us a method to diagnose whether the candidate has NPS in 4 steps

1. You ask a very difficult question.
2. The candidate replies “No Problem”.
3. You respond “Oh! That’s great. So can you tell me again what’s the issue you are going to resolve?”
4. a. If the candidate can tell you what the issues are, they are not suffering from NPS even if there description of the issues are wrong.
   b. If, however, the candidate can only provide their solution and can’t iterate the issues, unfortunately they have NPS.

Now you must have guessed my first question!

Weinberg, Gerald M. Becoming a Technical Leader: an Organic Problem-solving Approach. New York, NY: Dorset House, 1986.