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Admin
Kevin would like to print this comment in Java.
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firstfirst
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Admin
Java has everything you'd ever need to do built into it by design. Just say "the _____ API" and you'll be right every time!
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So you were supposed to be interviewed at 4:45 and at 4:55 you decided the job wasn't worth waiting for any more? The job market must be brilliant in the UK ...
Admin
ifth!
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So what's the Java API for posting comments?
CAPTCHA: verto, when you get dizzy only halfway
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Gotta agree with this. It probably took you longer to get ready and get there than you waited.
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??? I'm sorry, I don't understand what TheDailyWTF is driving at with this article. Also it took too long to read.
Admin
Jeanne is clearly not like me. I'm awesome after all.
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Thankfully the job market is pretty good over here. Well, at least good enough that you don't have to beg and be grateful for any job that comes along. A job interview is not just to see if you are sufficiently awesome and lucky that someone wants to give you a job. It's also about seeing whether the company is a good fit for you. I'm pretty sure I don't want to work somewhere where my boss managed to forget about an interview and I was left sitting in a room by myself for 20 minutes. It may be an honest mistake but, in my experience, those kind of companies tend to have no documented requirements, awful code, barely implemented source control, and an unpleasant work culture.
Admin
The article doesn't say anything about being unwilling to wait, just that he “went hunting for someone.” In the case of a misread, it's the receptionist getting ready to leave, not the protagonist.
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I'm not like Kevin, but I bet I'm pretty good at writing bugs.
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I love the Infantile Expectancies story. I think the correct behavior in such a case would be to poll the guy at least once a week until either of you die if he has already become rich with his brilliant company.
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I know Kevin, I've worked with Kevin, and you sir, are no Kevin.
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Wow! That last reply in Infantile Expectancies even made me angry and it wasn't even directed at me. If I was Roger, I would definitely follow up after a few months to ask them how it's going (but to mainly call the CEO an asshole).
Admin
Wow, equity in a worthless company. Gee, thanks, but actually, could you just pay me in toilet paper instead?
Admin
The "someone like Kevin" story makes me think of what I call the Good Ole Bob syndrome in help wanted ads. I think everyone will recognize the kind of ads I'm talking about. Good Ole Bob worked for the company for 10, 15, 20 years or more. Good Ole Bob had extensive knowledge of the company's systems, business processes, and data. Now Good Ole Bob has retired or otherwise left the company. HR decides to replace Bob by placing an ad listing all of the things that Bob did. The problem is, its not likely they will find one person that can fill that role. At least, not the way that Good Ole Bob did it.
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Hey, toilet paper in some places is a luxury and worth a lot of money.
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FTFY
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If I'd been forced to wait ive minutes, I probably would have walked out too!
Admin
Needs something more...
If the company is already advertising, it would be loads of fun to ask them more about the provided services, string them along, and then finally reply with "why the %$#@ would I pay for this when it's already available for free, at translate.google.com ?
Admin
That article is for too medicore for me.
Admin
To be fair, if you were asking me how to print with Java I'd be equally stumped - I'd assume you were asking about specifics of how to generate rich text for printing, what formats the API supports, text layout etc. An answer as trivial as "the printing API" would never come to mind.
Admin
To be fair, if you'd ask me "how to print with Java" I'd be equally stumped. I'd assume you were asking me what specific classes to use, how to format text for printer output, that kind of thing. Stuff that'd be clear with a few minutes of googling; but I couldn't answer that off the top of my head. An answer as trivial as "the printing API" would never even occur to me.
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Admins; kindly remove the double comment - for some reason, submitting a comment seems to take me back to the comments form, so I'd assumed I'd hit the wrong button. (Konqueror/3.5.9)
What is up with that anyway?
Admin
It does sound like that. Unless the receptionist (who was leaving, remember) meant that the interviewer had already left too. Perhaps that's what the interviewee meant by the words 'oh dear, she forgot about you'.
Otherwise, 10 minutes are still barely in my margin of politeness.
Admin
It's a feature. They provide you with a WTF even if the daily article doesn't have one.
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RBS (Royal Bank of Scotland) are that useless and inefficient that this particular story re. the interview doesn't surprise me. I've often done business with them and failed to get any sort of response or reply without bullying and chasing.
They deserve to be in the terrible shape they're now in, it's comeuppance.
Admin
Coding Java is difficult, WHEN YOU'RE LIVING IN A VAN DOWN BY THE RIVER!
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Well... no. No he didn't. At 4:55 he went looking for someone to find out why the interview was running late. And if you think that's an unreasonable thing to do, I wish you luck of being trapped in a bank after all the staff have forgotten about you, left and locked up :)
Having ascertained that a) your interviewer has completely forgotten about you and b) that the forms you've just been given to fill in are exactly the ones you should least be allowed to see, the question becomes more how desperate you'd have to be to still want that job!
Admin
But at least you would have said something. Even if you don't know exactly what the interviewer is looking for, a smart person can start a dialog about it. Staring blankly definitely would not be the right answer.
Admin
Aside from the part where the receptionist gave him his own evaluation form, it might well have been a test. Yeah, "Leave him in a room for an hour and see how he acts" is something from a bad movie, but it can be useful to see if a candidate reacts when unsupervised. Does he/she take the initiative and go find someone, fall asleep, start texting friends on a cell phone? If they'll do it during an interview, they'll do it during work.
They blew it when they gave him the eval form, though.
Admin
Given that last email to Roger, I would reply with "You are wrong and you will fail. Your last message describes yourself. Bye."
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The Infantile Expectancies CEO is wasting his time in his current position. A big thinker with a total disregard for reality is more suited for politics - or investment banking.
Admin
I would wager that the "CEO" in the Infantile Expectancies story was probably some college kid who thought he had a brilliant (or brillant, as it were) idea and figured that he could hoodwink someone into working for free, and then take all the profits.
Notice the language he uses in his correspondence: a lot of big, impressive sounding words, and often using two or three words where one would suffice. Real businesspeople don't talk like that, it's the crooks and idiots who do as a cover for the fact they don't know shit.
Admin
Yeah, like, "I'm not quite sure the exact methods, but I plan to Google for 'the Printing API' to find them"
Admin
"Coding Java is difficult, WHEN YOU'RE LIVING IN A VAN DOWN BY THE RIVER!"
Oi! I resemble that comment! (I used to live in a truck, by the river Trent, and work as a coder for a flight simulator graphics engine company.
Happy days :)
Admin
What is it about CEO's that makes them so stupid?
The last start up I worked for, the CEO had this mentality that he shouldn't have to pay me. So, he in fact stopped paying me and insisted that I'd be well taken care of when the company took off.
Meanwhile, he was spending company (investor) money on personal items and a vacation for himself. I was young and stupid, so I stayed around and didn't get paid for 6 months.
Then he was ticked at me for leaving...
Last I heard there's some tax fraud case going on with him, as he decided he shouldn't have to pay taxes either. I got a call from an investigator, who told me that the CEO was claiming he didn't have any employees for that year, and made no sales.
Admin
"Sufficed to say" -- what? Those words (is that even a word?) don't make any sense. I think you meant "suffice it to say", which, believe it or not, isn't just a series of sounds you can make with your mouth, but an actual set of words with meaning! Specifically, it means "it should be enough to say...", implying that you're understating your point. Suffice it to say, you should know that.
Admin
Roger, the CEO in the Infantile Expectancies story wasn't looking for a guy like you. He wanted a guy that would get the job done without complaining. With superhuman programming abilities. With incredible amounts of charisma.
He wasn't looking for you Roger Garrett. He was looking for Kevin.
Admin
'Charles Ross' should have been more modest. Clearly whoever processed the interview forms was worried that he'd take their job.
Admin
Most companies close at 5 P.M. in England: that's why pubs are full at 6 P.M. and you can't find a good dinner after 9 P.M.
Admin
Given the response of the receptionist, my guess was that the manager had already left.
Also, the protagonist wasn't leaving, they just went to find someone to find out why they'd been sat around for 20 minutes - in my experience even if you turn up early someone will stick their head around to make sure you're still OK or offer you a drink.
Admin
I believe their point was that toilet paper would actually be more useful than equity in a worthless company.
Admin
The normal work day is 9 to 5. If nobody had come to see me at 4:55, I'd be worried too...not because I wanted to leave, but because I'd be afraid my interviewer had left. He didn't just walk out, he went to look for somebody, in case they'd forgotten he was there.
Admin
We can debate about the usefulness of programming tests, but if someone hands one in unfinished, without so much as an acknowledgment that it's unfinished, then he's lucky to get an interview.
Admin
Honestly, probably even a misguided or incorrect attempt at an answer would've been better...who wants to hire somebody who just shuts down and stares blankly when presented with a problem he doesn't know how to solve?
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Mine finishes at 5:30pm, at 6pm I'm somewhere on the hell that is the London Underground and by 9pm I might actually be home, assuming the trains aren't entirely fucked.