January 16, 2007
A brief explanation on why I think that asking people if they read technical books is a good interview question; prompted by a recent candidate calling the idea 'stupid' and a 'big waste of time' then days later a bunch of my coworkers seeing my study and noticing how many technical books I own.
1. First, as a direct retort to points made by the candidate a) yes - there is a class of technical books that basically any competent Microsoft software developer with some writing skills could crank out, and they are useless b) yes - there is a good deal of API-level documentation built into Studio and many solutions to issues are available on newsgroups and via web searches c) but no these are not the only books out there and there are levels of thinking and classes of problems that cannot be designed by hitting F1 and cannot be solved by doing a search with the error message that you get back from the compiler, kernel, or api.
2. Nobody knows everything. Those that think that they do are wrong, plain and simple. In the software development field - a new crisp field which is wild and broad and in some areas untamed - things change and new ideas show up all the time. The one constant difference of this field with others is that since it is new people tend to think that they should only read new books and that they should learn new technologies only.
The basic education that you get from a C.S. degree and 3 years experience does *not* normally get your feet wet with some of the *root-level concepts* that are important to your ability to do well. These concepts have been around since potentially the 60s and are core to this field and your ability to do excellent technical work. These concepts are available via some light reading and lots of on-the-job experience that is enhanced by this theory.
At the same time, things are changing. The new version of C# should probably be learned, and the new version of SQL Server as well if you are one of the idiots that make your living hacking Windows during the day (myself included). There are also new ways of thinking and new manners of technology in practice that come up everyday, and you should get with those as well. All good stuff and not useless.
Also, my vote is NO HIRE.