Comment Re:There really was a shortage of *good* people (Score 3) 385
I remember an interview I went on, for a Perl job. I passed the first interview with flying colors; talked about my programming philosophy with a programmer, got along great, got a second interview. Passed the second interview with a hiring manager. Then, was asked into a back room by the alpha geek of the organization, who hit me blindside with three bizarre perl questions (debugging problems? I don't know what else to call them). Each was totally bizarre, not even remotely connected to normal practice, and was the sort of thing you'd write a little driver program to check out anyway if you came up against it. For example, one had something to do with an arcane scoping issue, with a variable of the same name changing scope like, three times. Flabbergasted and freaked out, I failed his three "tests", and he smugly smiled at me and showed me out.
The only thing this proved was that the guy was a complete jackass. I mean, for example, who uses the same variable name in three different scopes that way? You'd have to be retarded. The questions were nonsensical. If he'd given me something normal to work on, I'd have been fine, and I'd have hired. For the record, I ended up working somewhere else, and built an application used throughout the organization among many other things, improving many of their internal systems and in general making myself very useful (not meaning to bang my own drum).
I guess my point is, if you subconsciously want to prove someone incompetent, you won't find it too hard to completely frustrate and annoy them, and "disqualify" them from consideration. A better approach is to try and see what they come up with in response to a real problem, without trying to catch them with brain teasers and such. I'm not saying that's what you did, mind you, but I've got experience with it and believe me, it isn't much fun to be on the receiving end. Especially when, if you're like most tech types, interviews freak you out anyway.
crazyphilman@programmer.net
The only thing this proved was that the guy was a complete jackass. I mean, for example, who uses the same variable name in three different scopes that way? You'd have to be retarded. The questions were nonsensical. If he'd given me something normal to work on, I'd have been fine, and I'd have hired. For the record, I ended up working somewhere else, and built an application used throughout the organization among many other things, improving many of their internal systems and in general making myself very useful (not meaning to bang my own drum).
I guess my point is, if you subconsciously want to prove someone incompetent, you won't find it too hard to completely frustrate and annoy them, and "disqualify" them from consideration. A better approach is to try and see what they come up with in response to a real problem, without trying to catch them with brain teasers and such. I'm not saying that's what you did, mind you, but I've got experience with it and believe me, it isn't much fun to be on the receiving end. Especially when, if you're like most tech types, interviews freak you out anyway.
crazyphilman@programmer.net
