Effective interview questions

It's unfortunately common for less-technical people to ask questions that amount to technical trivia as a way of assessing candidates' abilities. As a result, these interviews quickly devolve into conversations full of buzzwords, but never delve into whether a candidate actually understands what they mean.

If you rely too heavily on specific questions, you can easily be lulled into a false sense of security. So, don't spend time testing how well someone can use Google or StackOverflow. Instead, try to hire based on strong understanding of fundamental concepts over encyclopedic knowledge of esoteric facts.

I've found it most effective to structure questions like integration tests because they quickly gauge whether someone understands how modifications will effect other coupled components. Then, assuming that I'm satisfied, I continue by asking how a candidate would decide between approaches that accomplish the same thing.