interviews

Joe Rogan Experience #1368 – Edward Snowden

All episodes of Joe Rogan Experience podcast are nearly three hours long, so I usually just watch the highlights. But this chat with Edward Snowden was well worth the full length watch.

Edward Snowden is one of the brightest and bravest people of our generation, and his story is fascinating. I think that this lengthy podcast episode provided a good channel for him to tell it. It’s not a tweet or a blog post, and it’s not strictly framed corporate media.

I also think that Joe Rogan is one of the finest interviewers today. In this episode, he shows that very well, but remaining silent for almost all duration of the show, with an occasional steer of the conversation.

I wish there were more content like this online.

Oh, and just for the record, “Permanent Record” is the book that Edward Snowden has written and is heavily referencing in this talk. I’ll definitely be buying a copy.

Awesome Interviews

Awesome Interviews is a curated awesome list of lists of interview questions. Technical interviews, mind you. It covers a wide range of areas from a variety of programming languages, frameworks and databases, to operating systems, data structures and algorithms. There also coding exercises and much more.

This list links to some really great resources for both candidates, who are preparing for the interviews, and interviewers who want to make their interviews better.

Cold War on Ice

Cold War on Ice is an excellent documentary about the USSR vs. Canada ice hockey Summit Series 1972 games. I find it to be quite balanced, showing the perception from both sides, featuring the interviews with the same people back in the day and their take on it now, and plenty of great footage.

It’s a must see for any ice hockey fan and history nerd.

Back-End Developer Interview Questions

A while back I blogged the link to the Front-end Developer Interview Questions. Today comes a similar link, but for the Back-end Developer Interview Questions.

Question lists like these aren’t just useful for adjusting your interviews, but also for self-checks and assessments. Each company, team, and project often require a slightly more specialized expertise, which often leads to narrower interviews and “tunnel vision”. Looking at other people’s interview questions helps to review and adjust the questions and address the gaps, resulting in a more rounded interview and expertise.

Interviewing astronauts

Here a couple of recent Q&As with astronauts. First comes the interview with Scott Kelly, with a whole bunch of questions around his time in space. And secondly, a few tongue in cheek answers from several space men and women. I found this answer by Barry Wilmore particularly entertaining:

“You never know true beauty until you see Earth from space, or true terror until you hear someone knocking on the space station door from outside. You look through the porthole and see an astronaut, but all your crew is inside and accounted for. You use the comm to ask who it is and he says he’s Ramirez returning from a repair mission, but Ramirez is sitting right next to you in the command module and he’s just as confused as you are. When you tell the guy this over the radio he starts banging on the door louder and harder, begging you to let him in, saying he’s the real Ramirez. Meanwhile, the Ramirez inside with you is pleading to keep the airlock shut. It really puts life on Earth into perspective.”