New Interview Questions for Senior Software Engineers

Scott Hanselman collects questions meant to probe how experienced developers think about design, patterns, trade-offs, testing, maintainability, and learning. He says the list is not a guide to interviewing or a trivia quiz, but a shared pool of topics for people with years of software experience.

He also stresses that the best interview is not a rote checklist. Several comments push toward design exercises, code review, portfolio discussion, and questions about communication, judgment, and how a candidate approaches real problems.

Reading notes

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• The list focuses on software design more than technical trivia.
• The post says an interviewer should judge whether someone can solve problems and think clearly.
• It includes topics such as SOLID, IoC, dependency injection, patterns, anti-patterns, concurrency, state, and testing.
• It also asks about legacy code, scalability, architecture, source control, continuous integration, refactoring, SQL injection, and production readiness.
• Several commenters prefer talking through real projects instead of reciting definitions.
• Some comments suggest asking for a portfolio of applications and discussion of design choices.
• Other commenters propose scenario-based questions, code exercises, and code reviews over memorized answers.
• The post ends up as a long community discussion about how to tell seniority, curiosity, and communication apart from buzzword knowledge.