Pointless tech interview questions again!

[vwdan]

"How can you live migrate a vSphere 4 VM with active snapshots?" (hint: It's not possible)

Eh? Since when?

[SimonMac]

Had an interview once and the guy asked me What is USB ?
"true story"

Isn't it a Swiss bank

[sal]

There are contractors that can't answer the questions and are extremely competent and there are contractors that can wipe the floor with any tech interview but are total cr*p when it comes to doing the job.

These technical tests don't really say a lot. I found out you have to learn to do tech tests. But the tech test skill is completely different to software development skill. All you end up doing who is taking on candidates who are good at doing technical tests.

You can spot a good candidate from the CV, sure you have to check he isn't telling porkies, the best way is to have an interview is just to get the candidate to talk through the CV.

The key is to know what you're looking for so you can judge the CV.

Of course there are plenty of people with skills and knowledge but are missing the ethics and end up doing crap job. A good interviewer will probably spot the usual cocky attitude and identify them early, if not you can fire their a**es quick enough. I don't understand how a competent person can fail a technical interview, unless they are extremely shy or with poor communication skills, in which case they are probably better of as permies. Doing interviews and jumping between jobs is part of contracting.

There is a difference between technical test and interview. On is a pre-determined set of questions that can be used over the phone for example to sort out the complete donkeys, before wasting your time for a f2f interview, where you can ask them specific questions.

[sal]

Eh? Since when?

My bad, forgot to clarify that i was talking about storage vMotion (i did in the interview)

[vwdan]

My bad, forgot to clarify that i was talking about storage vMotion (i did in the interview)

Ah! That did throw me.

[BlasterBates]

Of course there are plenty of people with skills and knowledge but are missing the ethics and end up doing crap job. A good interviewer will probably spot the usual cocky attitude and identify them early, if not you can fire their a**es quick enough. I don't understand how a competent person can fail a technical interview, unless they are extremely shy or with poor communication skills, in which case they are probably better of as permies. Doing interviews and jumping between jobs is part of contracting.

There is a difference between technical test and interview. On is a pre-determined set of questions that can be used over the phone for example to sort out the complete donkeys, before wasting your time for a f2f interview, where you can ask them specific questions.

There's no harm in a couple of technical questions on the telephone. The best project team I worked at, when they interviewed me over the phone there were three pretty simple technical questions and the rest was about my CV, the same went for everyone else as well. At the f2f I wasn't asked one single technical question.

This is how to conduct an interview and the project was pretty outstanding. I doubt there are many projects as well run.

Most interviews I've attended there is usually a technical test that says very little and the project is usually pretty badly run.

That's the difference between Engineers and Programmers. Programmers are fixated on syntax and language features, engineers want to build robust systems.

[MyUserName]

My most recent interview involved me talking two interviewers though my background and cv for 2 hours and then being given a spec, a computer and being told to write the program that fulfilled the spec. After an hour some interviewers came in and asked me to talk them though the program I had written.

Seemed quite a good interview.

[d000hg]

There are contractors that can't answer the questions and are extremely competent.

Why can't they answer basic technical questions if they're competent?

[BlasterBates]

Why can't they answer basic technical questions if they're competent?

They aren't basic technical question in these tech interviews. If they were everyone would sail through, that's why it's pointless.

[Batcher]

My most recent interview involved me talking two interviewers though my background and cv for 2 hours and then being given a spec, a computer and being told to write the program that fulfilled the spec. After an hour some interviewers came in and asked me to talk them though the program I had written.

Seemed quite a good interview.

I've had ones like that. Can't help feeling that they have a problem they can't get round so conduct interviews to get the answer that Google couldn't provide