The Only Interview Question That Matters

Alan Adham — co-founder of Blizzard Entertainment — had a move during interviews that sounds almost too simple. He’d ask candidates: “So, what games are you playing?” Not as small talk. As the filter. His logic was airtight: if you don’t play games obsessively, you can’t make great ones. If the craft doesn’t consume you when nobody’s watching, you have no business shaping it for millions of people who it does consume.

Most software companies somehow never applied the same logic. They hire for resumes. They hire for system design whiteboard performances and leetcode pattern matching. They hire for pedigree — the right school, the right logo on the LinkedIn profile, the right number of years in the right stack. And then they wonder why their teams ship mediocre products.

I have my own version of Adham’s question. In every interview, at some point, I ask: “So, what are you building outside of work?”

And then I shut up and listen.

What I’m listening for isn’t a portfolio. It’s not a side business or a GitHub contribution graph that looks like a heatmap of someone’s social life. I’m listening for the itch — the thing they can’t stop tinkering with even though nobody’s paying them, nobody’s watching, and it’ll probably never ship. Someone who built a janky Discord bot for their friend group has demonstrated more to me than a pristine FAANG resume ever could. The bot is proof of something a resume can’t capture: this person builds because they can’t help it.

The bar isn’t output. It’s obsession.

And in software specifically, this matters more than in almost any other field. Software has one of the highest rates of change of any profession on earth. A lawyer who stopped reading case law five years ago can still practice. A surgeon’s fundamentals don’t reinvent themselves every eighteen months. But a software engineer who stopped being curious three years ago? They’re already working with a dead map. The territory has moved and they haven’t noticed yet. Building outside of work isn’t just a passion signal — it’s how you stay literate in a field that won’t slow down to wait for you. Not chasing every fad. Just maintaining the willingness to pick up something new, break it, learn from it, and move on.

AI is the clearest proof point right now. Not because AI is everything — it isn’t. But because it’s the most visible litmus test we’ve had in years for whether someone is still engaged with their craft. The person who tried three AI coding tools and decided they’re overhyped? I respect that — they engaged. They formed an opinion through experience. The person who never tried any, who’s still waiting for someone to tell them what to think? That’s the problem. That’s the dead map.

And here’s the part that kills every remaining excuse: AI collapsed the barrier to building. The “I don’t have time” argument — the one that used to be at least defensible — just evaporated. A single person with a laptop and an AI tool can now prototype in an evening what used to take a team and a weekend hackathon. The cost of curiosity has never been lower. If you’re still not building anything, it’s not a time problem. It’s an interest problem.

Now — I can already hear the conventional wisdom sharpening its knives. “You can’t ask about side projects. It penalizes people with families. It’s hustle culture wearing a hiring manager’s badge.”

I get it. And if that’s what this question meant, they’d be right.

But that’s not what this question means. Building doesn’t mean a startup. It doesn’t mean a SaaS with a landing page and a Stripe integration. It could be a weird home automation nobody else would want. A script that solves an annoying problem in their day. A half-finished thing they can’t shut up about. I’m not asking “do you work eighty-hour weeks?” I’m asking “does this craft still light you up when nobody’s paying you to care?”

That’s not hustle culture. That’s curiosity with a pulse.

The people who build outside of work aren’t grinding. They’re scratching an itch that won’t leave them alone. And those are the people I want on my team — because when the hard problems show up, and they always do, those are the people who lean in instead of checking out. The hard stuff isn’t a burden to them. It’s the reason they’re here.

You can teach someone a new framework in a week. You can’t teach them to care.

And if they don’t care — if the craft is just a paycheck and the curiosity died somewhere between the second promotion and the RSU vesting schedule — no amount of interview prep will hide it. The question finds them every time.

So, what are you building?