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Admin
“you have an irate customer on the phone. He says the server is not working correctly. He is demanding that an engineer goes on site to fix it. So what do you do?”
I put on my wizard hat and robe.
Admin
Hypothetical questions that stay somewhere within the realm of sanity = OK.
Hypothetical questions that fly off the road of sanity almost immediately = NOT OK, pointless, and insulting to anyone with working gray matter.
Testing ability is the real goal, not checking to see if someone is willing to go thru a journey of Adventures in Stupidity.
Admin
that's right after you clean all the brown matter off your face, right
Admin
Great, stop being such a cheap bas&%rd -- hire engineers to deal with technical issues and customer support people to deal with the customers -- stop expecting the engineer to do both. As we all learned from Bob Slidell in Office Space, the engineers are not good with customers.
Admin
Take the peach back and inform store of fauty peach.
Admin
I just found this blog today. So...what was so hypothetical about that first question? Or am I the only person that has actually had that situation, tried every angle, then gotten screamed at by the manager for, in order: 1. Angering the client 2. Failing to fulfill client expectations 3. Trying to ring the manager on his day off 4. Jumping the chain of command by calling somebody other than the manager and 5. Being the guy whose site ran into trouble.
Admin
It was probably a bad question that was too open ended. I've had the same experience with asking a question about how to deal with an impossible schedule. I get candidates pledging to work progressively more and more overtime. I try to stress that on-time completion is impossible, but candidates refuse to give up on fixing the schedule.
In the end I'm concerned with how they communicate schedule slippage to the stakeholders. The question is really simple as soon as you accept that trying to succeed is impossible and that you are being assessed on how you handle failure. Maybe this was that same kind of question? The interviewer probably should have made the parameters of the question clearer.
Admin
Wouldn't that be the red pill?
Admin
Anon, the problem is with the cocky response at the end "I'll ring you, you appear to have the answer"...I wouldn't dare hire someone with that 'smart' attitude. keep solving roadblocks still you're stopped.
Admin
Wow. Simon spent a REALLY LONG TIME digging himself into that hole, and somehow avoiding saying anything that sounded remotely like SSH, VNC, or RDP.
2nd WTF... same goes for the first 150+ comments.
Admin
The real WTF in the first story is committing to spending a ton of resources to go on-site to fix a problem without first verifying that there is a problem. The interviewee completely failed, and then didn't even get the point of the exercise.
Admin
For hypothetical guy - you obviously put this luser on hold and after few hours advises him to execute rm -rf /* on the server. Or jump on it until it's fixed.
Admin
that reminds me of an online comic, "general protection fault" where these weird guys were testing someone to see if he was "the one"...one test was to give him a computer with no word-processor programs and see how he reacted. he WROTE HIS OWN!