Surfing among my RSS feeds when I got into Daniel's posting ("More on Job Hunting") and the pretty nice thread with all different but great opinions, he'd mentioned on his blog.
Here is what I believe and experienced in my life. Please note that these are all about hiring a developer and so, neither a consultant nor designer or so, as their interview types differs a lot from view...
I've never been directly in charge of hiring nor owned a company or so, but in many cases, I've been asked for doing the technical interviews. So to me, as an interviewer, it's really important to perform the same way which I would like to see when I'm in interviewee position. While having some basic questions about some general stuffs can help the both sides to know more about each other, I'm not much for non-technical ridiculous questions while going for technical interview! Going to some technical information exchanges fit the best for me and I really love them. In this way I can really expose my experiences and see what other side has to say, and perhaps learn a bit from him/her both on interviewee and interviewer cases (yes! why not?).
It's really boring for me to sit there for hours to fill the interview forms (specially those nastily copied from the Certified exam sheets) and answer many dumb non-technical questions in a-question-from-them-an-answer-from-me kind!! Hey man! It's technical interview... Start hitting me with real world practical cases and questions. See what I have in my resume and check their validities by some technical discussions.
Someone at the above thread had said that he'd been asked for the differences between SAX and DOM parsers and so... It's just reminding me of an interview I'd gone for many years ago as a java developer (not so much separated editions then). You just can not believe the question types they asked me (yes! four technical guys there to interview me). All pure academical questions which none of them matched any of their working acreas. Can you beleive that they were asking me mathematical questions? Ranging from the grade I'd scored in "Differential Equations" course in university to what particular sections a compiler has (name and describe them) to what an automata (from "Theory Of Languages" course) is and how it's being used!!
I was just like "eh?! Are they going to hire me as mathematical engineer to do their Mars Lander programming/calulations or I'm gonna do some pure java stuffs and so?"
Much more to say in this regard but not quite enough time... I would be glad to hear your thoughts.
Armond
Posted by armond at May 23, 2004 02:20 PM