> Why not just summarizes the traits of the technical skills you expect from the candidate, lay it out, and come up appropriate questions for each interview?
That won't work; it's aimed at a different kind of skill.
The skill the GP is looking for is ability to solve a problem you have never seen before, for a problem that bears little resemblance to anything you've done before, by transferring your existing general problem solving skills. It's a test of your ability to solve new things, which is a capability the company finds useful.
This is a very useful skill, and you can learn to do it better, but it's not a "technical" skill as we usually mean it. However it is one of the things which might be associated with "great engineer".
Listing technical skills and testing them will not tell you if the candidate has developed the above capability.
The GP isn't asking a very good question to identify that skill, is the point. Interviews in other technical industries don't ask these kinds of questions, because they're not really useful as a gauge of, well, anything useful.
> It's a test of your ability to solve new things, which is a capability the company finds useful.
Correct.
I work with early-ish stage startups. There's always a library that solves any given known problem. We don't have the scale or nuance to need to reinvent the wheel.
Where I really need engineers to shine is in solving the parts that don't have a library because we've stumbled onto something new. Or at least something new to the team. Or the way we've cobbled libraries together creates something new.
The important work is the work you haven't done before. We're engineers not line cooks.
November should involve completely different work and a whole new set of problems than February. If you're still doing the same thing you did in February, something's gone wrong.
That won't work; it's aimed at a different kind of skill.
The skill the GP is looking for is ability to solve a problem you have never seen before, for a problem that bears little resemblance to anything you've done before, by transferring your existing general problem solving skills. It's a test of your ability to solve new things, which is a capability the company finds useful.
This is a very useful skill, and you can learn to do it better, but it's not a "technical" skill as we usually mean it. However it is one of the things which might be associated with "great engineer".
Listing technical skills and testing them will not tell you if the candidate has developed the above capability.