In the sixties they used to give Aptitude tests to applicants unless you graduated from college recently. At IBM, they started to hire English majors as programmers because so much of programming at the time involved writing specifications and user manuals. IBM found that English majors had pretty good reasoning skills and could write better than the average natural sciences or engineering college graduates.
Later, it became a fad to ask technical questions that only someone versed in the field would know. In one case, I had an interview where I was asked some arcane feature of C++ which I answered and then asked the interviewer if he had read the recent Dr Dobbs journal article on C++ interview questions. He hadn’t, so I shared one with him and he couldn’t answer it but to avoid any embarrassment on his part I said something humorous and then answered it too.
They wanted to hire me but as a project manager and I knew in this company it would be an onerous job. I told them I’d prefer a programming position but they tried to entice me with more money and doing the project manager shot for a year. I knew that wouldn’t work and I just knew they would renege on their promise so I walked away.
Now it seems the questions are quite fanciful where they try to get the interviewee out of his/her comfort zone to see how they’ll react. This guarantees that they'll hire a certain kind of frat boy as I consider this type of interview demeaning.
Another kind of interview is the team interview where you’re invited to have lunch with the team and they pound you with questions so you can’t eat a thing. My strategy here was to ask questions back about the work environment setting up a dialog and getting one person to talk about how it was working for the hiring manager. Some embarrassment resulted but you can tell how well the team works.
On a different team interview, I thought it was odd that each person in round robin fashion asked a question. It turns out everything was carefully scripted with each team member reading the next question in line on their interview script. I didn’t like that interview much as I felt they were too stiff. Basically, you need to be prepared to just say no to the job when the vibes are wrong.
Back to the fanciful questions, you need to develop a sense of out of the box thinking. During the interview, think out loud and ask questions about what you can assume. It’s not expected that you solve the question rather they want to know how you pull the problem apart and develop a solution. Of course, there are always some folks who gloat a bit as you work, providing little guidance and hope you’ll really sweat. However, that gives you a clue of who not to work with once you get hired.
My candidate interview strategy has always been to ask questions based on what’s in the resume provided and to explore what I find. I also encourage a dialog telling them about the work environment and the tools we use and find out what tools they have experience with. It’s always great to hire someone with alternative experience to bring in new ideas for the team to consider.
College students are particularly fun to interview because they don’t always put down important stuff in their resume and you have to tease it out during the interview. In one case, I asked the student if they had any graphics programming experience and they said no but on the resume they had done a gaming project so I’d ask about that and lo and behold they did some graphics there.
My nephew lost a job once because he said he had no C programming experience when he actually did in some college courses. I asked him about it afterward and he said he didn’t feel he knew it well enough. A second interview fixed that issue and he got hired.
Often they feel if they don’t really know something then they won’t say which is a shame since you need to sell yourself and tell the interviewer what they want to hear particularly in how you can help their business.
My apologies for this long winded post. You got me to remembering the poor interviewing practices we now have in the industry.
