Interviewing

In my current position I'm the lead Java developer because I have the most experience and know as much as, and maybe even a little bit more than, the rest of the people on the team. Part of my strategy to keep my skills sharp, is the routine investigation of other languages and tools. Most recently those languages have been C# and ObjectiveC (and their related frameworks, .NET and Cocoa respectively). Apparently my boss took note of my new knowledge and a few days ago she asked me to conduct technical interviews for a "senior" Microsoft .NET developer.

I was a bit anxious about the request because I don't consider myself a .NET expert. But I approached these interviews the way I've approached all the Java developer interviews in the past. I try to cover a broad range of topics (e.g., Relational Databases, OO, Patterns, Object Relational Mapping, Unit Testing, HTML, insert programming language here , etc.) and just substituted the Java questions for C#/.NET questions. What surprised me is the quality (or the lack thereof) of the people I've interviewed. Maybe I should be looking for a .NET job? ;-)