“What are your current time commitments?”

– If you’re hiring me 8 hours/day and I agree to your schedule does it matter if I say that I drink and smoke things or if I say that I read and watch tutorials non-stop? I can say one thing and do the other, you don’t know if I’m really doing that or not so you can’t judge if I’m a good programmer or not based on this question. I commit myself 120% to my projects/job and 0% out of the working hours, as everybody should. “

“Do you see yourself as a project manager, a developer, or both?”

– In my opinion (based on experience) a programmer can become a good project manager in time but only if they fully commit to doing so. Ask me if I’d be prepared to play the project manager for your team and I’ll refuse because project management is a profession itself and it would be disrespectful to say “sure, project manager, design, networking, cleaning the bath, whatever you need boss” without knowing how to manage the time and having no business oriented mind. Good programmers don’t have good business minds (most of them anyway). They treat their projects like their babies, never considering them truly grown to be let out in the world until they reach their idea of perfection for that project or have enough of that project. Give them a tasklist for a project and they complete it, let them think business and they’ll lose a lot of time.

“How would you manage a team of programmers?”

– The answer above covers this pretty well.

“I need this done over the next couple of weeks. What steps will you take to finish them on time?”

– You don’t know coding, will you understand my answer? Could someone with little to no skills in programming give an answer that you’d say is ok and be mistaken about it or not? 🙂

“If I need something that you have never done before, how would you approach it?”

– This is a good question. If they mention community websites like StackOverflow or Google they learned the first part of programming and that is to overcome your fears of the big code spaghettis and search info on viable sources

“What would you do to ensure that our servers are up 100% of the time?”

– So I don’t need to be only a programmer AND project manager, I should be able to be a sysadmin as well. You really have a problem here. I’m sorry but most human beings can only excel to one of this areas.

It’s true about the personality, many programmers have some elitist attitude but let me ask you something. How many projects do you want to deliver and in how much time? 2/month or 2/week? In this case maybe getting the programmer with bad attitude but good coding skills would be better I guess. However if the skill difference is low then sure, go for the guy you like. 🙂

As a side-note the best interview I went to was strictly technical, talked a bit about the technologies that I’m going to use, what I want to learn from now on and other blabla things and then got a 3 pages test containing a few things from every area (programming languages, platforms, frameworks, unit testing, servers etc). Completed as many as I could (while leaving some sections entirely blank) and got a matching salary.