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
Really excited to see the bunch of contributions, improvements and enhancements to client side java listed on JavaDesktop (from all community, developer and end-user point of views). A whole lots of new components which J2SE was really missing them, perfect, professional and sexy Look&Feels and much more turned me ON easily, after a while being far from hard-core GUI development!
Will java be back on desktops? I've always been a GUI development fan and I'm very hopeful now by seeing all those sexy stuffs ;-) Hey! I've really missed the old days developing client side!
Moreover, you'll find a lot on client side toys here:
- Javio
- JGoodies
- Javootoo
- L2FProd
Woohoo... Great job guys!
Armond
Hrm... when I'm going in WIKI notation on my blog, usually I forget that I'm not using Confluence... Heavily making use of macros, interwiki links, emoticons and so on then find out you have none of them is a total piss-off!
Having my blog here (MovableType) support Textile plugin, I wish I had the full Confluence notation support on Textile too. Alas...
Armond
While I'm closely tracking the discussions, reviews and talkings on the next generation EJB architechture (and really glad to see the officially acceptance of POJOs and DIs/IOCs by major vendors), I do agree with Dion on the concerns he has.
Really why should they see the backward compatibility as mandatory while they're going to go for simplicity by changing the whole model and architechture? A trick to keep the current vendors still as the main players without allowing any new comers to expose what they have for EJB 3.0 only ?
Look at Spring ... I'm sure there will be many guys out there, want to drive their projects by EJB 3.0 only. No need to have application servers to support all those nasty and foolish 1.x/2.x classes, interfaces and architechture, to call them EJB 3.0 compliant :-( I wish this can be changed in the final version!
Armond
Experiences finally got its new home on my own domain, up and running here!
Great thanks to Mike and Atlassian for hosting my blog so far...
The sad news (at least for me!) is that my hosting doesn't have any Java support so I have to go mostly with CGI, Perl and PHP! Since I've been using MovableType from the day one and I found it far better than other PHP players out there, so just decided to stick with it. Also having no data migration headache push me more on this way...
I wish I could install Confluence for both my site WIKI and Blogging stuffs! Man! I really love Confluence like my child :D It rocks! Especially with the latest fixes and improvements we've done on WIKI rendering and exporting (HTML, XML and PDF) engine, it will fly for v1.1! Something really mature and usable which easily bits any other Content Management and WIKI system out there (both java and non-java ones)...
Well, Experiences new home is accessible under:
http://blogs.armondavanes.com/experiences/index.html
And for the RSS Feed, here it is:
http://blogs.armondavanes.com/experiences/index.xml ( RSS 2.0 )
http://blogs.armondavanes.com/experiences/index.rdf ( RSS 1.0 / RDF )
Armond