What's your favorite development language and why? What other features (if any) do you wish you could add to this language?

Interviewing Web Developers - Good Questions to Ask

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15. What's your favorite development language and why? What other features (if any) do you wish you could add to this language?

Asking about feature additions is a particularly valuable question - it can reveal if they're skilled in programming in general or if their skillset is pigeonholed into their language of choice.

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Other Interview Questions

• What industry sites and blogs do you read regularly?
• Do you prefer to work alone or on a team?
• How comfortable are you with writing HTML entirely by hand? (+exercise)
• What is the w3c?
• Can you write table-less XHTML? Do you validate your code?
• What are a few of your favorite development tools and why?
• Describe/demonstrate your level of competence in a *nix shell environment
• What skills and technologies are you the most interested in improving upon or learning?
• Show me your portfolio!
• What sized websites have you worked on in the past?
• Show me your code!
• What are a few sites you admire and why? (from a webdev perspective)
• Fix this code, please.
• I just pulled up the website you built and the browser is displaying a blank page. Walk me through the steps you'd take to troubleshoot the problem.
• What's your favorite development language and why? What other features (if any) do you wish you could add to this language?
• Do you find any particular languages or technologies intimidating?
• Acronym time (oh boy!)
• What web browser do you use?
• What are a few personal web projects you've got going on?.