Rant: Job Interview

I think I am beginning to understand. I finally interviewed a candidate for my (as in "to work for me," not "to replace me") position. I thought it stopped just short of being a train wreck. Trivialities first. I realize I am in IT, and being 2007, we're in the post-Internet-bubble world. It's a little like Postmodernism in art -- it is not the same as Modernism, yet we can never go back to the way artists thought before Picasso et. al. So I knew better than to expect a well-fitting suit, white shirt, polished shoes and a properly tied tie. But an untucked pink shirt, top button undone and tie loosened, wrinkled khakis, clunky casual shoes, and one of those slouchy, unconstructed cotton sportcoats that he took off as soon as he walked into my office? Evidently, it is now too much to ask someone to show a modicum of respect for the occasion by being neat and well turned out.

On to the substance. Why do people insist on trying to bluff their way through things? Why must they talk at a hundred miles an hour for ten minutes, boast about how they believe in automation, how they were never given an opportunity to achieve great things in their current job, use the word "endeavor" until I was ready to vomit, and sprinkle it with a few "highleveldesignlowleveldesign" for good measure, but when I ask them for details of what they, themselves, have done on a specific project, they can't tell me anything, at least not in a way that I understand? I will be the first one to admit that I am not the computer geek that many of my colleagues are, and that I don't know the inner workings of JXPath. But I've been in the industry for twelve years, and have actually built a thing or two that worked. I can't be completely clueless, can I? If someone can rattle off a dozen buzzwords from the apache.org front page, that does not make them an expert in all of them, does it? Ok, I am probably not being sufficiently generous. Perhaps this is a problem of communication, not of expertise. But is that not a serious problem in and of itself? I mean, I am going to have to talk to the guy on the daily basis, and he'll have to talk to me. We don't just sit around playing with XML databases all day while the guys in Stuttgart are doing the real work. We've got customers to worry about.

The kicker, however, was the test. It is not a difficult test -- a couple of basic programming problems (and I mean basic -- compute the product of all element in an array) to be written in Java. He writes pseudocode. Explain the difference between a redirect and a pipe in Unix. No clue. Write a representation of a book in Java. He comes back with no class keyword, no return types, no braces. And guess what his resume says? BS Computer Science; Sun Certified Java Programmer. What is wrong with this picture? We graded generously (I would gave given no credit for the programming problems, but M.M. gave him 2 out of 5), and he scored a 62.

To my amazement, M.M. thought the guy basically knew what he was talking about, which kind of made me worried for a minute -- maybe it was all me after all. But the test results were worrisome to both of us.

Never was I able to offer the following interview advice with more confidence: be honest, answer the questions, and whatever you're talking about, be absolutely sure that you are making sense. I used to think that those were the lowest common denominator in the professional world. How naive of me.

To shake off the traumatic experience, ran about five miles last night (the Four Mile Run trail is seriously creepy after sundown -- ladies, stay away. Gentlemen, too.), followed by a Magic Hat Hocus Pocus from my fridge. I felt better.