7 surprising lessons from interviewing in India

  by Allan Mertner | 07 Mar 2008 | Permalink | Home Page, Software, Software Engineering

During my recent visit to India, I interviewed several potential candidates for our offshore development team. In doing this, I learned some valuable lessons about interviewing in India that I will share with you so you can avoid some of the pitfalls that are obvious – but probably only in retrospect.

By way of introduction, Tideway is not trying to outsource development work, but rather intend to extend our excellent London-based team with a great team of people in an offshore location – in this case looking at Pune outside of Mumbai, India. This means that we intend to hire people that will work for us directly, rather than simply get an outsourcer to allocate us a suitable set of heads – where you are never sure who you work with or how long they will be assigned to you.

To aid us in doing this, we are working with a couple of companies that help companies set up in a remote location, dealing with local facilities, internet access, payroll, etc – and also help us find candidates that fit our criteria. In this model, we will to all intents and purposes set up a Tideway office, but without much of the risk associated with doing so directly.

So, what are the surprises when you want to hire great engineers in this exciting part of the world…?

The first surprise was that all of the candidates I spoke to had taken the time to frequent our web site and familiarise themselves with some of the messaging and positioning of Tideway, and had extracted enough to articulate some of what we do.

This showed a level of interest and engagement that I see only rarely in the UK – bottom line is that the candidate is more likely to know something about what you do and the role than usual, so you can save a bit of time here.

The second surprise was that questions that I would normally consider fairly “soft” completely baffled most of the candidates:

What kind of work do you enjoy doing? drew mostly blank looks; the word “enjoy” doesn’t seem to be in the vocabulary. Ordinarily, this question allows a candidate to demonstrate his enthusiasm for technology or code or whatever turns them on, and talk about aspirations and things they would like to do. Even when pressed, most candidates seemed to think that admitting to enjoying work is a no-no.

Those that did answer the question tried to flatter me with the answer. “Working with Tideway’s Pattern Language is what I really enjoy” was a common answer, and although TPL is damn cool and exciting, this wasn’t an answer I found particularly useful.

The third surprise was how hard it is to get an Indian candidate to talk about specific things he or she has done. Asked about past work, they were all surprisingly good at regurgitating the marketing messages of their pseudo-employers (most of them have worked for outsourcers in the past) and eventually also spoke about what their teams had accomplished, but were most reluctant to get to specifics about their own contributions.

Going to an interview, you have to be aware that this is a common issue and that you will need to allocate sufficient time to get past the “the team did it” answer to get a real feel for what your particular candidate is capable of.

The fourth surprise was how useful a couple of fairly normal questions proved to be, with a bit of digging to follow up on the the initial responses.

What do you consider yourself really good at? was not a question that most candidates seem well prepared for. The answers were thus not that interesting and were very generic (Linux, Perl programming, etc), but allowed me to ask a follow-up question that I found most useful in determining which candidates might be best suited for Tideway.

Having told me their primary area of expertise, I would then ask them to “Tell me something about that I don’t know. Something is particularly interesting, or unique, or surprising perhaps, that demonstrates your depth of knowledge.” A few candidates did well here, understood the question, and were able to drag out a good example, but most of them did badly. They either did not understand what I wanted, and just described their area of expertise in generic terms – not very useful; I already know that Linux is an open source operating system, thank you 

Tell me about something you learned recently also turned out to be very useful in determining the level of the candidate. I told them it could be a tool, a useful technique, an insight, a programming language, or whatever – just something they had learned in the past few months.

Some of the candidates had indeed learned something interesting, and the best couldn’t stop listing all the things they had learned, small or large. Most of the candidates however were at a loss; they didn’t feel they had learned anything at all as they were “too busy doing work to learn”, or their one example was so basic it made me re-evaluate their technical level of knowledge. Ouch.

The fifth surprise is that it is remarkable unattractive to work for a traditional outsourcer.

This is great news for Tideway, since we are not pursuing this model and therefore are much more likely to attract the best people to work for us: We will make them part of our team and will work on making them productive employees for the long term. As part of this approach, we will bring them to London for training and induction, we will maintain daily contact via conference calls and IM, and we will have regular site visits to make sure we stay in touch with each other.

And we will allow our offshore employees access to the internet, of course! One of the impediments an outsourced employee faces in learning something is that many employers forbid access to anything but the corporate intranet: Insanity, if you ask me!

The sixth surprise was how much they are motivated by praise. I always ask what the candidate considers his biggest achievement, and in the UK normally get answers describing a particularly clever implementation, a deadline that was met, a thorny problem solved, or something of that nature.

In India, the answer was invariably that the biggest achievement was to receive praise from their boss or employer for a job well done. Of course, praise is important, but to my mind receiving praise is not an achievement in itself: what you did to deserve the praise is the real achievement. Presumably, this comes back to the earlier point that it is hard to get any detail about what they actually do.

The seventh, last and biggest surprise however was the quality of the candidates in general. All of them were highly motivated, hard-working individuals hungry for the opportunity to work for Tideway and prove themselves in an international, growing, exciting company – and all prepared to work extremely hard to get there.

Indians don’t work a 40-hour week, but consider something closer to 50 hours the norm. One candidate put this into perspective when he said that he really wanted to work for us but that he would not be available “full time”: He could only work 12 hours a day for 5 days a week, as he needed 2 days with his new family…

Whether we now decide to open our next development office in India or go somewhere else, one thing is for certain: India is a happening place, and with millions of eager and hard-working people in the IT business, they will have a huge impact on how everyone does business.