How Would You Interview Potential Managers?

martincmartin asks: "The company I work for is starting to interview development managers, and I've been asked to interview a bunch of them. While there's been a lot written on interviewing programmers and what makes a good manager, how do you interview a management candidate? What questions do you ask? What are good and bad answers? What else do you do?"

Re:What level?

[Anonymous Coward]

Does the phrase "development manager" in his query give you any clues?

Re:What level?

[martincmartin]

Middle managers, directly managing around 10 people who write code, and reporting to the product manager.

Management Style

[Edward Kmett]

It really depends on the tier of management for which you are hiring the manager.

When hiring someone to manage a bunch of programmers, ask them questions about the Mythical Man Month, agile software development, iterations and traditional waterfalls, and try to figure out if he understands the ways programmers think. You're not looking for a coder, but you do want someone who understands the lingo. If the guy sounds off with how he'll never ask his people to do something he couldn't do, perhaps ask why he'd limit his team to the scope of his own abilities. Try to get a feel for his management style, if the team is small, and he is an ace-programmer, maybe he is more of a team lead candidate than a manager candidate. Skills with MS Project, Visio, Powerpoint, etc. are useful. Finding out how comfortable they are summarizing results and presenting material.

If you are hiring for senior management perhaps add questions about earned value management and try to get your head around how they have invested in improving their personnel in the past, and move away from the particulars of managing coders, because job duties will probably extend into other areas.

In either case, management style is a big factor. I am not a huge fan of the screaming-foreman style of management. IMNSHO, a good manager knows when to let his employees own their own deadlines, and how to keep s#!t from flowing downhill; they will go to bat for their team when they are right, and work with them to solve the problem when things go wrong. Asking questions about situations where someone underneath them has been thrown 'under the bus' and how they handled it and how they have handled situations where their estimates were wrong, is a good way to get a feel for their personalities in good and bad situations. A good manager inspires loyalty and doesn't make you dread coming to him with bad news.

I recently left management for academia, and ultimately made the round trip to coding and systems architecture when I received an offer from the best manager I had ever had the pleasure of working with. We had worked together during the dot-com days and moved on to separate fields in the meantime. I mention this to demonstrate that a solid manager can help you retain or acquire your best people and inspires loyalty.