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Technology
The Interview Starts Before the First Question
Jun 14, 2026
After interviewing more than a thousand engineers over 27 years, I have learned that great hiring is not about clever questions, resume theater, or gut feeling. It is about structure, signal, preparation, and the ability to separate people who can merely make things run from people who can actually think, design, debug, and own complex systems. This article is a practical, opinionated guide for interviewers and candidates who want engineering interviews to be less random, less theatrical, and far more useful.
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