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Admin
So two WTFs: people who don't read resumés before inviting for interview, and interviewee who bluffs knowledge he doesn't have.
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But how can he be too slow? I thought it meant A Slow Programmer...
PS: Shouldn't this be in Tales from the Interview?
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Where's the WTF? Dave has just learned his first important lesson about life in the IT business.
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Which is that it's fairly full of WTF's.
Also: before taking a three hour drive to an interview it's a good idea to call ahead to figure out what the job will entail and what the employer is looking for.
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One WTF really. The guy seems to be pretty smart and with the way he performed in the interview, I'd be pretty sure he could have all the knowledge needed by the time he starts the job.
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Looks like typical HR dept. decides who gets to be interviewed and has no idea what the job requirements are or what they mean. What we have here is failure to communicate....their mind's not right.
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So they asked questions completely unrelated to the position the guy was interviewing for? Why not just point it out? I'd assume they made a mistake or something. TRWTF is him actually trying to answer the questions.
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[Bob rolled his eyes, and smugly replied, “You pretty much got everything right, which was impressive. You just took too long. We want experienced programmers, y’know ten years in the industry, the usual. We’ll keep you on file, and maybe when you’re a big boy programmer, we’ll bring you back in.”]
Oddly enough, I've been in the industry over 22 years and I've worked with people of various skill level. Some of those people claimed 20-25 years experience, but couldn't figure out a simple algorithm if it hit them in the face, and I've seen some (admittedly few) people with 2-5 years who behave and are skilled in the way I'd expect a person with 15-20 years experience.
Experience is a good marker for "how good/skilled" the candidate must be; it should never dictate how many actual years are needed to pass the interview. Otherwise you'll land up with idiots that have 25 years of twiddling their thumbs doing development on radar aircraft guidance systems...
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And we all have been in our very first job interview once, and at that time we were not the "job interview" professionals we (hopefully) are now.
So Dave is hardly to blame.
The company, on the other hand, won't give a damn. Unless they have to fork out Dave's expenses, all they are investing is the time to interview him. And if the interviewer is still trying to get his act together, a few test interviews with candidates that won't get selected anyway is good rehearsal.
Admin
i would show them a copy of resume and tell them that there is no mentioning of ASP skill in it. so to get everythign right would mean that person has broad knwoledge and can quickly learn and addapt to new environment. guy has skillz...
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TRWTF is the diagram being in German.
Captcha: sagaciter
Admin
Same thing happened to me when I was at uni - there was a software company located near my home (Seagate Software) who were advertising for testers, so I wrote to them asking if they had any positions for a summer internship.
They invited me for interview - 3 hours on the train from uni - and clearly no-one had read my letter nor my CV, they had assumed I was graduating in 1 month time and not a barely capable freshman.
Pro tip #1: Always get your expenses settled before correcting the interviewer
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I had exactly the opposite happen to me once -- just a few years ago, in fact. On deciding once more to explore the job market, I was pointed towards a company that was looking to recruit IT professionals. I dutifully polished the CV and took it along to the required place at the correct time, clad appropriately in my interview suit. After about half an hour of expressing considerable interest in the wealth, depth and breadth of experience on my CV, I was told, "You will of course be in an entry level position."
"I beg your pardon? I'm a professional with 25 years in the industry. I have a considerable quantity of skills and knowledge, and know that I am worth three or more times as much as you are offering."
"Be that as it may, we prefer to take people in at entry level and train them up. Come on, you can take a job at 2ok now, and you never know, by next year, once you have proved yourself capable, you can be looking at a ten or twenty percent payrise."
At which time I thanked him for his attention, apologised politely for having wasted his time, and after the socially necessary farewell greetings made my way back to where I had parked the car.
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Should have been a single paragraph in a Tales from the Interview post. Although I did approve of the title.
Admin
TRWTF is this article being titled "ASP Holes" when ASP and ASP.NET are completely different web technologies.
As for answering the questions: why not? On my first interview, they gave me Hibernate questions, even though I mentioned I had no experience with Hibernate specifically. I answered them based on common sense and my knowledge of other ORM systems. I got the job, and later I had no difficulties maintaining the project that used Hibernate, which was actually a breeze compared to their first project - a legacy monstrosity that used a hackish homebrew ORM system with tons of boilerplate.
Admin
My former pet peeve occurred when when I was first searching for a job in IT. I would see listings that said "entry-level", and then after reading the full listing I would find experience requirements of a year or longer.
Even though the term originated in HR, it seems that a lot of HR people don't know what the term means.
Admin
Lame. Again.
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( US, incidentally )
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Not giving the guy the promised lunch is BS.
Also, TRWTF is Chicago "pizza"...
Admin
Surely the real story is that the recruiter probably "updated" his CV to include ASP.NET as this was a requirement for the job.
Admin
Oboy, you trying to start a Jon-Stewart style flame war against deep dish? It is awesome!
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Oh, now I get it. I mentally pronounced ASP as "ei-es-pee" and it just didn't occur to me.
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It might not be that the recruiter hadn't read his resumé. It might be that the "head hunter" had modified it to fit the available position before sending it to the recruiter. This is quite common. Recruitment agents are scum, but until you've been in the industry a while, it can be hard to make the contacts that you need to bypass the recruitment agents.
Admin
Just fancy cheese on toast. In this case the toast happens to be half a baguette. Big deal.
Admin
cost him more than a day, not to mention a real Chicago pizza cost him about as much as his gas on the trip, but sounds like the practice went well.
Admin
I had a similar experience. I am a .NET developer, and about 6 years ago I was looking for a job in a new city. I worked with a half dozen different recruiters in order to improve my odds. One seemingly helpful recruiter set me up with a job interview. I arrived to meet the hiring manager and she showed me the tiny office space in a very expensive part of the city. 2 dozen programmers were crammed into cubicles that were so small they probably violated some fire/safety code. She then led me into a conference room, and being asking about my Java experience. I quickly described a 5 month stint as a QA engineer in a Java/JSP shop but had since moved on to the .NET world. She didn't seem to get my point because she began giving me a pop quiz on Java topics. I answered as best I could, but after the 3rd question, I asked if they were using Java or .NET. It was Java, of course. I politely explained that it was no longer my forte. She didn't get the hint and tried to get me to answer more Java questions. I literally had to stop her and tell her clearly that I was looking for a .NET position, not a Java position. She still didn't get it and tried to encourage me to finish the interview. As politely as I could, I apologized for wasting her time and left. I don't know if she was literally that desperate for good programmers or she hadn't read my resume at all. Clearly the recruiter hadn't either.
Admin
Smack Open Source again and you can get off the train and walk! We tend to give people with Open Source experience more "experience" credit than those without -- shows they can use their brains themselves instead of only knowing what Redmond says it right.
Admin
TRWTF is Dave not questioning Bob as to why they brought him in for an interview in the first place. Even though he already knew the answer, he should have asked, just so Bob would know that his hiring incompetence didn't go unnoticed.
Better yet, tell him off. There's no point in maintaining that bridge, so go ahead and burn it.
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John Stewart, is that you?
Admin
I had something similar happen to me, only it wasn't that they really cared anything about my qualifications, it was that they needed a warm body to interview so they could say they interviewed X number of people.
Almost 30 years ago I drove through a snowstorm, 250 miles, from Oregon to Seattle, got a hotel room, etc., all out of my own pocket (starving student).
The guy who had flown in to interview candidates for a company that made inkjet printers for printing on food containers, didn't stick around for the interview - he went down to the arcade game room while the local guy interviewed me for 30 minutes and then shook my hand, while making comments that led me to believe they had already chosen someone else.
That was early on in my career and I thought it was just an anomaly, but over the decades I have come to learn that yes, a lot of employers/interviewers/etc. are not only anal orifices, but they generally do not know their anal orifice from a hole in the ground.
Admin
The problem with burning your bridges with one employer is if you anger them, they are more than willing to get on the grapevine and bad mouth you to anyone they can.
As with trolls on the internet, it is best to just ignore them and walk away.
Admin
You mentally pronounced it retardedly, your way sounds like ISP.
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Yeah, I'd imagine that the resume in front of the interviewer looked nothing like the real deal.
Admin
If having Chicago style pizza was the high point of his trip, it clearly was a hellish experience through and through. (By the way, lest I be seen to be on the "other side" of the debate, I don't like New York style pizza either. Pizza should not be floppy!)
Admin
Obligatory debate-ending quote: Pizza is like sex. Even when it's bad, it's good.
Admin
Would another WTF be driving into the city instead of driving to a spot where you can take a train into the city? I've only been to Chicago a few times, but public transportation wasn't that bad, and I think it would be better than trying to drive in.
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