What are the best elixir question asked you in an interview?

My vote: these are terrible interview questions.

I know man but these are just examples

• What is the BEAM and how is it different from the JVM ?
• What is OTP or how does Erlang and Elixir deal with concurrency ?
• Why choose Elixir instead of Erlang ?
• Functional Programming Vs Imperative Programming
• How engage are you with the community ? Do you attend meetups, conferences, do you write articles or tutorials ?

Why would I even need to know this? I am not going to extend Phoenix or contribute to it – at least I have no plans to do so at the moment.

Answering something like this properly would require that you actually needed to delve deeper – which is something I can’t imagine you would need in a normal web project.

They just want to know did you try to research this topic. I think they want to know how curious you are.

These are very good questions. Also it made me think about the first question. All I know is JVM is focused on objects and has a new operation and beam has tail call instructions.

Agree it’s a good question and can be answered several way. First thing I thought of without knowing that much about JVM is discussing aspects that are pretty unique to BEAM like scheduler, lightweight processes, message passing and concurrency based programming. If they follow up with OTP then go on to mention the core pieces that make all the former more accessible.

Also liked functional vs imperitive: well imperitive feels like garbage and.. or to be serious seems good if you can speak on the origins and goals of I guess C vs Prolog and how imperitive’s path differs

Honestly, good interviews are a conversation. You can get more relevant information by having a simple conversation and trying to understand the individual rather than quizzing them. I’ve made a lot of my best technical hires by having a conversation for an hour and doing no deliberate technical/coding interviews. Given the context of the conversation it tends to naturally focus on more technical topics. You can typically get a good read on things like passion and curiosity and whether they value things you find beneficial for the organization/position. Sometimes a less knowledgeable but more hungry/passionate candidate can be a better hire. I very rarely go into an interview with prepared questions.

What do you mean by JVM? Can you translate? (sarcrasm)

This a so bad question to ask, because not all developers in world code in Java

As @anthonator said just have a conversation and let things roll down the coast, and you will be surprised how a person can reveal itself, for the good and for the bad, after he/she starts talking without feelling pressured with interview questions.

The best interview question is:

Talk me about your Journey to become a developer?

Then things will just roll in naturally, and you just should make questions based on what the person is saying to explore/clarify more some subject, and keep in mind that questions should be of type open end, not black and white, or true or false.

Yes, It should be like that. But I’ve never faced this and they have predefined questions if you were not able to answer that. Then they will not select you.