@ellesaurus There are two parts to it:

Their ability to acquire new skills is way more important than their current skill set.

Whether or not they are interested in staying up to date is an indicator of that.

I cannot think of any wrong answers to "Where do you get your tech news?" - but if your answer is "I never read any tech news" then you will probably have some explaining to do - and I will learn much more about how you think and how you work when you do that explaining.

If you have e.g. 5 years of typescript experience on your resume, then a coding test tells me nothing that I couldn't have found out simply by reading your resume.

So the point of an interview with me on the other side of the table is never to prove that you can do what you said in your resume that you can do - but instead to find out if you are a great fit for my team.

@anders
I'm not convinced there's any correlation between reading tech news and learning new relevant skills.

I don't agree you get a grasp of someone's skills from someone saying they have 5 years experience with TypeScript. Give me two developers with the same skills and experience on a resume and I virtually guarantee I'll see two two very different skill levels.

Not that that has to be done via a coding test, but I do think it requires some investigation.

@ellesaurus It does require some investigation for sure, but I tend to find that there are way more time-effective ways to do that than coding tests.

Your answer to "How do you learn about new technologies?" is generally also an opener to talk about doing experiments with new technologies.

Your answer to "How do you get your tech news" is an opener to talk about your other interests, your passions within tech - or if you are just doing this for work and are passionate about flowerpickhing or some other random thing in your spare time.

Think of the "10.000 hour rule" which - while probably false - still can be a good indicator of skill level. If you spend a lot of your waking hours thinking about tech then that tells me something about your skill level.

But, the one thing that mostly tells me about your skill level is the way you talk about the tech you are using.

I'm likely to follow almost anything you say about a tech choice you made with "why" and then I'll learn some way more than any code challenge could give me, and the opener questions are an efficient way to get there.

They also tend to lead to way more comfortable interviews than coding challenges do.

If the candidate leaves the interview feeling like this was a pleasant experience, then they are more likely to choose to work for us. I like to be able to hire talent, and to do so, they must think that this is a nice place to work.

@anders @ellesaurus I'm not trying to say I couldn't follow tech news, but if I'm not actively doing things that can relate to news it doesn't need to be an active focus of mine.

In contrast, I have possibly been a source of news for other people in municipal things, and being invested in civic news has directly contributed to me making things different (taking notes at a meeting and stopping a small child from going headlong into a car are causally linked)