Question for Irish programmers.

protos

Kernel32 wrote:

When you conduct interviews you get so much better insight into what will leave a good impression and what won't.

And what does make a good impression ? When you're asked questions like -
"what are your strong and week points ?"
does the answer really matter - surely the interviewer knows that you're just reeling off some stock answer from an interview tips website.

Interviews are pretty stressful - its hard for anyone to be themselves in that kind of situation.

Fmicrochip

And what does make a good impression ? When you're asked questions like -
"what are your strong and week points ?"
does the answer really matter - surely the interviewer knows that you're just reeling off some stock answer from an interview tips website.

This is a good point. In some companies, employees will get HR training e.g. Interviewing Skills which is useful.

But from the interviewee perspective, you must control the interview, answer those types of questions in a way that puts across your points. When you go into an interview you must have an idea of what you want to tell the interviewer and no matter what questions are asked you can throw in the information you want them to hear.

Kernel32

When I interview someone I am looking for a few things. First is, does this person have some level of social skills that will allow them to become a team member. That is really a gut instinct thing for me.

I always have a candidate talk about his resume with me so I understand it. This can be very telling about a person. One candidate who didn't make it comes to mind because he lost me on this part of the interview. He was very experienced but he went off into a long meandering detailed technical description of this one project he worked on. He made two big mistakes. First mistake is I don't give a crap about the detail of his project. Second mistake was that he described it at the technical level. The position was a senior position and he should have described it in terms of design and patterns. Lesson to be learned, talk about subject matter in the context of the position you are being interviewed for.

I want to know if the candidate has a good foundation of knowledge. I ask fundamental questions. What is a class, what is an interface, what is cohesion. I want answers that are not tied to any particular language. A fresh graduate should be able to answer these questions, never mind someone experienced and I would say at least half the developers I interview cannot answer these type of questions with an air of confidence in their answer.

I want to know if the candidate has a good grasp of the basics of the core technologies that got them to the interview stage. I deal mainly in .Net so I would ask what an assembly is, what is the GAC, describe the lifecycle of an asp.net page. Stuff like that, no code just basics. Again many developers are unable to answer these questions even though the job was advertised as senior .net developer.

I don't ask what your weak and strong points are. As a manager that's my job to figure out and direct the persons talents in the right direction. I do ask scenario type questions. One very simple one is how to troubleshoot. Example: You have a major problem in production and you are the senior person to take the lead on resolving the problem, what do you do? I have several like this that I might ask. Which takes me back to weak points and strong points, how you react to a situation will highlight those.

I want to see someone who considers what they do a profession and will conduct themselves professionally. I don't mean wear a shirt and tie, you can appear professional with shorts and sandals if you conduct yourself in a professional manner. I want someone who will answer with a level of confidence in their response. A response of "I don't know" said the right way can have a positive impact versus an incoherent jabbering to cover up that you don't have an answer.