I Stopped Checking If You Know the Answer

I had a candidate repeat my question back to me, wait a beat like something was loading, and then recite a definition word for word out of an encyclopedia.

That is not what any of this is for. Not the interview, not the work itself. I am not there to hear the definition. I am there to see what sits underneath it. The questions have not changed much in years. What they measure has.

Besides working as a React developer and frontend architect, I lead a team, and I run the technical stage of our interviews. It is one of the better parts of the job. You get an hour with someone in the same trade, watching how they think and how they actually use the tools everyone claims to use.

I start with soft skills, but the technical kind. I know what the team looks like and who fits into which gap in it, so the first thing I want is how a candidate works with other developers, and what they do with code review. Small, unglamorous stuff, and the answers are not always small. Someone tells me that a reviewer picking at their code is a bit much. Or that review is beside the point now, because the model writes it well enough already.

Next is how they deal with people who are not engineers. Teams vary, some large, some small, but the skill that matters everywhere is being able to tell a non-technical person that the thing they want will not perform, that the approach is wrong algorithmically and will cause problems, and that there is another way to build it. That conversation has to happen, because the alternative is a developer whose ego takes the ticket as written and ships it to prove they deliver, when the feature could have been built properly instead. The same skill shows up at demo, where questions come in from outside engineering. Someone who takes those calmly and offers options is telling me a lot.

Then there is what they do with generated code. Is this a vibe coder, enter, enter, done, next. A CLAUDE.md sitting in the repo and no verification on top of it, which is how dangerouslySetInnerHTML reaches production without sanitisation. After that the plain ones: do keys have to be unique, does this really need to be memoised. If the answer comes in their own words, with an example from something they actually built, I know who I am dealing with. And these are the basics, or they look like it. If someone does not get through them, we do not get to the hard questions at all.

I am not checking whether a candidate knows the answer. I am checking whether they stop at it. The model never stops.