[orokusaki]

I think the best questions are technical questions that give the employer insight into the scope of my skill set. For instance, my previous employer asked what "idempotent" meant. Prima facie, this might seem pedantic. But, if you think about it, "idempotent" is quite frequently used by people who work in REST APIs, which infers that I probably have been reading about REST APIs or HTTP concepts in general or at least people's blogs about REST APIs, etc.

Next, he asked me what the first argument to a Django view was. This was a pretty basic question, but if I hadn't known the answer, it would be instantly clear that I didn't have actual experience in Django, and if I did have experience in Django, the question wouldn't seem like trickery.

I like this sort of questioning, because it reminds me of the year I decided to homeschool (in high school). The tests were on the honor system of course (you could easily cheat without a teach sitting right there), so the tests' questions would be about intricate details in a large (30+ pages) text, that you couldn't possibly know without reading every last line. You could try to find the piece of text for each question, but it was quicker to just read the whole text. Guess what. I read 100% of every text book I had (I would have cheated otherwise, and then missed things like The Walden, etc. :)