Thursday, November 02, 2006
Good concept, bad execution
The title of this post refers to an second round interview process I went through recently that was set up in 3 different parts. Each was with a different person covering coding, design, and troubleshooting. A good set of skills for any software engineer. However, here's a list of things that I thought were out of place, and ruined the actual execution of this process.
- Don't give someone a short (2-4 min) problem and then leave to play Mario Cart on your Nintendo DS for a while.
- Don't brag about your own software engineering skills
- Don't treat your interview like a power trip
- Don't go over your time by almost 2 hours when you know the interviewee has to drive back for classes and a test early the next morning (since you just asked him about those things)
- Don't "space-out" and forget someone just told you it was your turn to do your part of the interview, thus leaving the interviewee waiting for an unnecessary 20 minutes. Oh, and if you do, you probably should just tell the interviewee you needed to wrap something up.
- Don't tell the interviewee that you left your last job because you thought large companies hired to many "dumb" people and you can't stand incompetence