Rules for a better interview process

[VectraMan]

younger guys who've studied to get into the industry cos it pays well but have no real passion for it as opposed to the older generation who are often largely self taught and got into it cos they love computers. Identifying the ones who do is quite a challenge.

To put a reverse spin on that, I turned down a (permie) job recently in part because I had the feeling the people I was interviewed by had no real interest in technology or programming and were only in it as a means to an end. Whereas the people at the job I accepted were obviously much more passionate about what they did and there's (hopefully) a genuine desire to push forward and develop new and better products by using new technologies. And that's important to the likes of me.

The former was in the financial services world, and although that might have been a meal ticket for the future, I think I would have been bored out of my mind.

[MyUserName]

The best interview question I have had was from a manager of an investment bank development team in London who was known for being very picky with his hires. I got through a programming test and associated concept discussion to finally meet him.

He told me he wanted to hear about a large complicated project that I had done a lot of work on. We chatted for 10 minutes about Viking history and then he said "Okay, you have had long enough to choose a project now tell me about it".

I told him about when I had lead a team to convert a legacy trade capture system into Chinese which meant porting it to Unicode first. Huge project, took over a year and I was lead programmer and technical manager of a team of 17 based in China.

He asked what the biggest problem was and then probed my solution and asking why I did not use other ideas (mainly ones he thought of as he pointed out if he could think of them in 5 minutes I should have thought of them at the time). There was no technical questions like "what do you think when you see 'delete this' in a function?" but he was absolutely ruthless and it got to the point where I could not answer some of the questions I could not remember the details. He asked me to talk about another project and we discussed a telecoms project I had worked on - we played again and after about 45 minutes I was exhausted and had a headache.

Got offered the gig and then lost it at the last second when someone better qualified jumped in. Ended up in the same bank in a different team which was odd but it worked.

[BigRed]

Couldn't agree more.

Dreadful Grocer's's's' apostrophe.

I must admit I spotted it before pressing submit as well but couldn't be bothered to change it

[BigRed]

The only interest I have is just keeping up enough to keep working. Beyond that's it's an excrutiatingly dull profession to be in.

That's you off the shortlist then

[DimPrawn]

That's you off the shortlist then

Good.

[OwlHoot]

I ask what technical books they have read recently. If they can't even name one, that's a bad sign IMO.

What an extraordinary idea - I haven't read a computing book for 20 years

I guess I'm in the DimPrawn camp - There's so many more interesting things to be doing (or reading for that matter) than reading than some geek computer manual.

[tranceporter]

Surely forums, blog posts and podcasts would be a better bet question nowadays

In the .net world by the time the book is out (technical books have a lead time of 3-6 months) the technology is already half way to being replaced. In node and big data it would probably already be out of date.

^^ This. I would rather watch videos on pluralsight subscription than read wrox books.

[Bunk]

Asked to see interviewer's resume to see if the personnel executive was qualified to judge the candidate

That's a good one! I sometimes wonder about that myself. There's a guy a clientco who was hired by a couple of completely non-technical staff. I looked over 3 candidates technical tests and told them I wouldn't hire any of them. They did anyway

[tranceporter]

Also, if you hire a team of people who live their lives on the latest and greatest cutting edge technologies, spend every waking hour on this blog and that forum, you end up with a team that don't deliver what the business requires, they just do what they want to do in the way they want to do it.

The only interest I have is just keeping up enough to keep working. Beyond that's it's an excrutiatingly dull profession to be in.

Wow. I seem to be in agreeable mood today, but the above sums it up for me. Every word has a grain of truth.