Slashdot Mirror
Interviewing Experienced IT People?
thricenightly writes "After more than 20 years in IT I've learned that the most valuable people in a team are frequently the old timers. Young pups straight out of college might (think they) know all the latest buzzwords and techniques, but in the real world, where getting working products delivered on time and on budget is of paramount importance, people who have been doing the job for a decade or two tend to be the people I'd rather be working alongside. I've recently been elevated to a position where I get to interview and choose those who get hired in my department. Although I'm very much focused on choosing the right person for the role regardless of age, experience or whatever, it's probably fair to say the more mature applicants will get a more sympathetic hearing from me than they might from most other interviewers for IT roles. The question is, what do I ask older applicants to get them to demonstrate the value of their experience? My current gambit is something like 'IT is seen as a young man's game. My next applicant after you is 23 years old. What do you know that he doesn't?' This gets responses ranging from the vague to the truly enlightened. All next week I'm interviewing for a number of senior software designer and developer roles. What should I be asking of the more experienced applicants, and what responses should I be looking out for?"
You insensitive clod!
Are you looking for ways to justify hiring more experienced candidates instead of less experienced candidates? Are you worried that the older folks you interview won't outshine the younger folks like you want them to? If you want to build a successful team, you should probably just make hiring decisions based on who you think will be more successful. Your pre-interview biases can only hurt your company and the industry.
And what have you learned from them?
Ubi dubium ibi libertas: Where there is doubt, there is freedom.
It's very easy to suddenly whip out the discrimination card, but it's perfectly valid in this case to prefer older applicants who have more experience in the job. Obviously, if there is a preference for older applicants even if they don't have more experience, something is up, but it doesn't sound like that's the case. (The original poster wasn't entirely clear about this, I'll accept).
-- All your booze are belong to us.
I think I've found that hiring passionate people, whether loaded with experience, or fresh out of college is the key. Someone who is passionate about technology and their job will ultimately lead you to a better work place, and will continually strive to improve on their work. Some people may be good because they've been doing it for a long time, but if they don't particularly care about the job, you can't expect them to continually want to do great things for your company, nor stick around all that long.
Ask them to talk about the mistakes they've made or project failures they've been a part of.
If they claim it's never happened, or it wasn't their fault, etc, then they probably are lying or stupid.
If they can explain the failure, why it happened and how they've avoided the same thing in subsequent projects you've probably got a good one.
Don't mention age! Don't mention you are discriminating applications based on age (even if you phrase it as being "more sympathetic"). You are setting yourself up to get sued bigtime!
I consider it to be a major problem that nobody in IT is willing to train junior-level employees up, anyway. But if you are convinced you need gray hair to do the job, ask them to give examples of projects they have lead in the past. That will give you a legal, meritocratic approach to being a discriminatory bastard.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
... and describes he's having the following problems delivering a product out the door to a customer site that's overseas with engineer support staff that have been up and traveling for 24 hours to get there.
Do you
A) Tell him "Call tomorrow- it's quitting time"
B) Bend over backwards to help.
C) Grouch about it
D) Solve it in 6 key strokes or less.
We have quite a few 'old timers' around our organizations. They think they 'know' it all, too, and they don't. In fact they're much more of a hindrance. We just, after a 3 months of complaining, got one to agree to replace the motherboard in a sun station- we had gone so far as to SCOPE the signal lines on the ports to point out there was a voltage issue... and that didn't even phase them.
A newer younger engineer would have simply yanked the board and dropped a new one in- which, btw, worked perfectly.
There are no right or wrong questions- it's the attitude towards helping out your fellow coworkers that's important. They don't teach it in school but the industry does burn it out. If they're older and they still have the right attitude (including how to help skunk work a project that doesn't have funding through leftover hardware) then they're the right choice.
If they don't have the helpful attitude, they're the wrong choice- age independent.
I work with a multitude of qualified and unqualified IT folks through the military and other contractor sites. All in all it's all about the attitude- that is the one thing I can recall about every single site. Most of the young ones are better with that... but I'm open minded.
oh and ...
IT interviewers tend to be terrible as the person who is interviewing proceeds to treat the applicant like auditing a software application. The same terms, styles and such simply don't apply. They are people just like everyone else, only with less showering and better toys.
You interview IT people much like you would interview anyone else:
You ask them deep questions, that require more than a few words to answer.
You put them in problem situations they would normally face and find out their process for working through them.
Get a feel for how comfortable they are with you and other interviewers, culture fit is incredibly important for small organization sizes.
Actually have READ their resume and ask them questions on some of the more small or trivial things.
Ask questions about where they want to be in 5 years, how are they with shifting priorities, what's their work goal for the next two months. Get a feeling for how they deal with change over time.
Ask them what they dislike most about their field. What they LOVE about what they do.
Get them to describe any long term projects they may have been part of and what they feel was their ultimate contribution to it being a success.
Ask them about their worst fuck up, everyone has one. This says a lot about a person when they can easily tell you one and how they learned from it. ... and for fuck's sake don't ask lots of stupid little nit picky questions unless you are sure they are embellishing on their field knowledge. Asking someone about the different arguments to a specific command or sub call shows that *you* don't get it. There's more in IT than anyone person can know, find out instead how they go about learning new things and how actively they do so.
--- I do not moderate.
I'm young and I'd rather work with young people because I find they learn new things more quickly and are easier to teach. OP is older and would rather work with people his own age because of their experience and wisdom and reliability or whatever. Admit that your preference has to do with your own age and move on.
As a classic example, I often point to a database design and a zipcode field. A newbie (and for that matter most people) would declare that zip codes need to be stored as integers and should they need to be formatted with a dash, that can be handled in the application layer. Now this is true in a general sense except for one thing... east code zip codes start with a zero. What will happen when you cast that zip code starting with a zero into an integer field? It's going to trim that leading zero.
Now an old timer will know this and set the zipcode field as a varchar.
The newcomer will not understand how to create objects as well as an old timer will generally as well. An old timer has alot of experience in creating objects and relationships and they have an easier time duplicating real life scenarios into a program or database.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
I think this is exactly what the OP was talking about. Sure, you're a huge computer nerd and can code anything and make it work, but that's a very small part of a software dev job. Collaborating with others, sharing ideas, designing, working with customers, leveraging your position to gain resources, convincing management why you're right, scheduling, so on and so on.. you don't get that coding at home and you don't get that at school.
I was fortunate enough to be thrown in to it and gain the experience in the Air Force, and how anyone "gets their foot in the door" blows my mind. I have some very smart friends who are very capable, but in an actual work environment, they'd be completely lost, and that goes for most everyone fresh out of college with a computer science degree. Experience is what makes you useful. An experienced programmer doesn't need experience in a particular language to be at least servicable, but a hotshot young gun could know a language like the back of his hand and be worthless.
I'm not saying I don't think you are capable or even that I don't think you have the experience. But whereas you (I'm assuming semi-jokingly) refer to how long you've been on slashdot as evidence that you know what you're doing, I would refer to the projects I've worked on and not only the work I've done, but how I've affected the team working on them as a whole and how they've affected me.
Which brings me to the OP's question. Some of the important things I listen for in interviews is how people have dealt with adversity. Name a problem you had on a project and how it was overcome. Name a time your solution was wrong and how you dealt with it. Tell me about a time you had a problem with someone on your team and how you overcame it. The technical stuff is a given -- look at their resume. I want to know how this guy will make us successful.
Whale
I think what you're doing is probably a worker's rights violation (disclosing others candidates' ages, asking candidates to make a case for a job based on their relative age). Even if it isn't or you don't get sued, no good employee would want to work for someone who interviews like that.
You should not be a manager. Nor should you be interviewing anyone. You represent your company extremely poorly and open them up to legal action. Or did I (and the editors) just get trolled?
While I'm sure your heart is in the right place, you're looking for something specific and are labeling it in a very unfortunate way.
There's nothing wrong with wanting experience. Try to bear in mind, though, that this experience COULD be obtained in other ways. Fill in whatever examples you want, but YEARS OF LIFE are not necessarily at all what you are looking for - instead you want to know what was learned in that time.
So, by that metric, "My next applicant after you is 23 years old" is a horrible lead-in. You're just begging for an old-coot response, and that kind of environment certainly doesn't make HR Directors smile.
Try something more like, "Tell me something about your work experience that qualifies you for a 'senior level' position". Or, "Give me an example of a time where your work experience really worked in your favor."
Again, replace the desire to find age with finding experience instead. It really, mostly means the same thing, and it doesn't have to be IT-related experience either. One of my best employees used to drive trucks, and I consider him very experienced indeed.
What you want is not so much an employee that is necessarily older but an employee with predictable skills, attitude, and way of thinking (or at least tolerable) in your eyes. As a bonus, you end up with the most compatible person for the role, regardless of age.
Don't ask the old guys
"about where they want to be in 5 years"
They don't give a toss as long as they are coding/testing etc.
Take it from me, once you get to a certain age, you don't give a shit about the greasy pole.
They know their limitations and thus can work within them and get on with the job.
And yes, I have called an old boss of mine a dipstick.
He didn't give me the sack. He just labelled me as an awkward bastard as what I told him about the project was true and it saved his ass.
I'm 55 and happlily desiging complex systems. I don't want to be a manager or team leader. I'm a Designer/coder/Architect/General Dogsbody who will tell you whats what with a proposal/project. Once my new boss understands that, we generally get along fine. Which is why I am a contractor and not a permie. I'm no threat to their job.
I'd rather be riding my '63 Triumph T120.
My current gambit is something like 'IT is seen as a young man's game. My next applicant after you is 23 years old. What do you know that he doesn't?'
It is illegal to discriminate against anyone over the age of 40. (For the US. Differs elsewhere.)
A question like that demonstrates, clearly, that you see age as a factor.
You see it in terms of encouraging older applicants.
People who don't get what they want are often somewhat bitter and tend to remember things differently.
They are going to simply see, "He openly voiced an issue with age. I'm over 40. I didn't get it. I'm suing."
Lawsuits aren't about who's right and wrong. They're about how much it costs you to defend yourself even when you are right. Your company may settle, even though you know you're in the right, to avoid court costs. They may win but still be out the tens of thousands it cost to defend themselves. Either way, you're the idiot who asked a stupid question and cost them a fortune.
Don't put age in to any question. Don't put gender in. Don't put marital status in. Don't put sexuality in. Don't put race in. Just leave them alone.
If you really want to give older people a chance, ask a question that's so removed from "age", no one can sue you over it. Try, "We've talked about specific experiences. What do you think the benefit of your culmulative experience is?" Then the guy who's got 20 years of it can be guided to what you're looking for.
But mention age, sex, race, sexuality, marital status, etc. and you're begging to get hurt.
You'd never ask, "I've got a male coming in next. Tell me how your being a female gives you an advantage he doesn't." or "I've got a white guy coming in next, tell me how the experience of growing up black in America helps give you the edge." Don't be stupid enough to do the same thing with age.
Try this one: "if we paid for additional training, or gave on-the-job support for it, what skills would you pursue"? And since you want experience, but you won't want to hire people who've reached their level of incompetence, ask them how much higher up the skills list they think they can go, and what they're doing to pursue that.
And do ask "what documentation you've written is still in use, and where"? Then go read it, if you can.
Ask the exact same questions to both age groups. Simple. If the age group with more experience cannot use it adiquately in an interview, the experience does them no good. I consider people in two types, learners and those who I will not give a job.
People are different. Some people can do the same things for decades and not learn a thing. I know a 60-yo developer who still says that X is going to take two weeks, when I can say instantly that it's more likely to take 6 months.
Then again there are those who live and also learn. From these people you should expect to see e.g. some of the following:
1. Ability to see what's relevant and what is not. Experienced people should be able to prioritize well, and see the forest from the trees. Junior people often pay attention to things that aren't all that relevant, i.e. miss the big picture.
2. More practical, less idealistic. Experienced people accept that the purpose of most companies is to make money, not to use emacs where it doesn't fit.
3. Better w/people. Experience helps w/dealing w/people. Many find the correct balance between hard and soft w/time. You should know when to push things, and when not to.
4. More experience means more experience in many areas. People who have lived for long tend to have better understanding of a wide variety of issues ranging from history to psychology to business and politics. More knowledge and more experience means that they can see things more clearly and come up w/stuff the young ones cannot, because they don't have the equal processed information databased between their ears.
5. They have made many mistakes from which they have had the chance to learn. I know I have already done my share of mistakes, and I have worked very hard to not to repeat them. Within this process of self-perfection lies the potential for true greatness.
There' surely are many more things, but here's my quick 2 cents.
The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne
which are like Burger Flippers.
They will write code for near minimum wage or under $25,000 a year with a comp sci degree or Microsoft certification. Usually aged 22-30, no spouse, lives at home with parents, and works 80 hour weeks with no extra pay.
But does a sloppy job and systems crash 12 times a day or more, but good enough to get work done.
The 35 to 65 aged IT workers will draw too much salary via their experience and will be worth $45,000 to $150,000 a year as Master Programmers. They will do quality work and the computer system never crashes because they close every object they use and free up memory and other advanced programming techniques. But since quality takes longer to code that sloppiness the Bit Flipper is usually hired over the Master Programmer as most managers don't understand how computers or programming works and hires and keeps the ones that can code the fastest. Not the best at the job, not the higher quality work, and not the more experienced or professional either.
Bit Flippers are usually narcissistic and selfish, or more like egomaniacs, but they tend to keep to themselves and write code most of the day while cussing out coworkers and managers under their breath.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
Obviously your age and experience have not prepared you for management. If you insist upon being a manager, develop an innate ability to read people, and pick them for their skills as well as their potential. This is why managers are not hardcore code monkeys, but instead people handlers.
I think I would be unsatisfied with any candidate that didn't recognize that it depends on the project. But what do I make of the wrong answers? Do they really not understand the idea of requirements? Did they recognize it but didn't want to argue with someone they were interviewing with? It's still an interesting question, although it might be a little more interesting if they were given an example system to prioritize for.
One common thing I noticed on resumes of younger IT candidates was the '18 month bounce'. The string of jobs they list all had right around 18 month durations. Which is just enough time to get familiar enough with a technology/process and put it on your resume before hunting for a new job.
The older candidates had longer stretchs of time at companies unless there was reorganizations/acquisitions or other events outside of their control.
I think it's a mindset thing. I don't know if younger candidates understand that a pattern of leaving just when you should be starting to add real value is a very bad thing to do to the company that hired you. It may be a 'what can you do for me' mindset.
Yes, I'm a bit of a codger myself in the IT field. When I was interviewing I would always ask what the candidate could do for the company. It's amazing how many of the candidates had no idea how to answer that but had plenty of statements of what the company could do for them.
If an interviewer asked me what you did I would thank them for their time and stand up to leave. If they don't know the difference between almost two decades of relevant work experience and a newly minted college degree then I don't want to work there much less spend the time explaining it to them.
Especially when the candidate says with a smile "These things must be done carefully or you hurt the spell".
Yes, it actually happened in a job interview in the early 90's for a programming manager position. I expressed concern that I've never managed people, only coded. They took that to heart and hired a manager.
Then again, a friend asked a company what they use for their code repository. The interviewer was mystified when my friend excused himself from the interview after the interviewer replied "Clearcase". My friend's position was that any company who's been sold useless crap at the CIO level rather than using ones that actually work isn't a place where he'd want to work. Seems he's had to deal with 30-minute Clearcase check-in times over VPN. Subversion and CVS "just work" but they weren't the corporate standard in the newly acquired company.
Yes, I've been around for 20+ years but that doesn't give me the edge on a 20-somthing kid who will work long hours and weekends. Been there. Done that. Lost a couple toes. Hire for the job. If you want people to swap war stories with, go to the bar at a LISA meeting.
Regardless of the age of my interviewee, I ask "why" a lot. I have the person describe what they did in this or that position or job and what decisions they made or contributed to. When they finish telling me about some decision, I always follow up with "why". Their answer will generally tell me whether or not the person is lying or exaggerating their role, but it also tells me a lot about their reasoning process. I'm not much concerned about whether or not I agree with their decision as much as how they arrived at it. As for old geezer (like me) oriented questions, you could ask about what they know from 20 years ago that still applies today. Make them be specific though. I'd also ask them to talk about how they learn and how they help their colleagues learn and grow. When I interview the "young 'uns" I ask questions about the aspects of development that aren't as much fun or as glamorous to see if they are serious. I put them into decision making mode and when they give me an answer, I ask them why. From my perspective, oneâ(TM)s abilities to reason, learn and share knowledge trump expertise in some technology. Technology changes all the time.
Very often, people confuse simple with simplistic. The nuance is lost on most. - Clement Mok
The question is this:
Given a software project such as (briefly describe a project the candidate might typically be asked to handle), how would you do it? What steps would you take?
We then let them speak. Everytime they stop speaking, we say "And then what would you do?"
The Question is terrific for evaluating a person's approach to software development. For example:
and so on.
I don't want to generalize much, but there is a tendency for older IT folks to fall behind, often far behind, the tech curve. You know, as we get older, we have other priorities which is OK, but you want that experience they have, but you also want someone who can take your company forward. But older IT folks are also very capable to get upto speed on newer tech often quite quickly.
You may require a specific skill set or technology, but the reality is that math and customer service hasn't changed all that much.
The servers need to work, the apps need to run and the customers and users need to be happy. If you need someone to twiddle something in the Next Hot New thing, hire the old guy and get him a code monkey.
Additionally, what the employee doesn't do is likely to be as valuable as what they will do. By the time someone hits their 40's or better, they're unlikely to say "screw the company" and fly off for week long drunken orgy with your secretary. They're also unlikely to do socially inappropriate things in front of customers or do really stupid things with your hardware like yanking good drives on a production machine "to see if the RAID works".
If you hire the right person, he's also likely to know how to cover your butt when something bad happens, where the young guy with nothing to lose would be just as happy to throw you under the bus.
Funnily enough, I've had the opposite experience: people who are younger, in terms of experience or age, are a lot more positive in their opinions and close-minded than older or more experienced people. I don't have a lot of theory around this, except that a more experienced person has had a lot more opportunity to be proven wrong about their preconceptions.
This matches my own personal experience. I can really only compare my "old" self with my "young" self, but I would say that the young me was more confrontational and irritatingly positive (you can use Perl for everything!), and more willing to do a lot of pointless after-hours work and be oncall. He was a lot less reflective and somewhat less rational regarding his decisionmaking. He had little broad perspective and familiarity with a few technologies that looked to him like all there was to know.
The older me is more knowledgeable, certainly, and more familiar with lots of "allied" tasks associated with programming. I'm a lot better at handling people. I'm a lot more willing to experiment or investigate new technologies for something rather than relay what's already in my toolbox.
This might seem paradoxical, but it makes sense to me. An inexperienced person has probably had few revelations like the hg example you give or using a functional programming language on a real project. An experienced person has a good feel for what kinds of tasks are no big deal and what takes a lot of time.
All that said, I dislike very much the idea that programmers are characterizable by their languages, their age or experience or their domain. Frankly I would leave that out of it and just do a straight interview (though you may be interested in analyzing differences after the fact).
demi
I would drop unimportant items from my inventory on the floor as I go from room to room. I would not assume that the maze layout made any sense whatsoever. And I would pay careful attention to any variances in the textual descriptions.
As for the punch-cards the sieve of Erastothenes method sounds like a great way to solve the problem. Do I get a hole-punch? A computer? Or the bits to make my own computer? Since those are the items YOU have could I not just write a short program on my RPN calculator instead?
Given that I'm only two and a half decades old either: (a) these screening questions aren't hard enough; or (b) I know more than the average for my age.
If I was interviewing I would want to know that the person understands version control. I would expect them to demonstrate that they could understand the user's needs (e.g. interface design). And I would want to know that they weren't hostile to development processes (e.g. code reviews).
Honestly, the question doesn't make much sense. I don't mean the one you ask your applicants, I mean the one you asked us.
Is your salary range wide open? Most positions I know of that might attract qualified senior people are completely out of range for someone who's 23. If I were asked this (and I'm not THAT far past 23, though I started professionally at 21) I'd be surprised. No one that young has really had a chance to accumulate the experience required for the positions I interview for.
So if your salary range is low, you actually might want to discard your more experienced candidates. They should all hold better positions, and the ones that don't you don't want. There will be exceptions of course, but finding them might be rough.
But let's assume it is wide open, or at least a large range. What are you actually looking for? It sounds like you want people who are 'good'. That's pretty vague. Are certain skillsets required? Are you willing to let them learn on the job if they show promise (my current position uses a language I was unfamiliar with, but I made it obvious during the interview that I knew how to program)?
If you're looking for generic questions, then ask them how they would go about solving a variety of problems, from simple to complex. While what they consider a good or not so great solution is important, far more useful is the decision making process that made them arrive at the answer they gave you.
Also, a fun interview question I like to throw at people: I'll look at something they list multiple types of on their resume (usually OS and Database). Let's say they've listed MySQL, Postgres, Oracle, and MSSQL. I'll ask which is their preference. I don't actually care. It's a setup for the following question, which is why? Many candidates will pick one and not have a reason.
Me: What about Oracle do you prefer?
Candidate: It's the best database.
Me: In what way?
Candidate: ummmm
in contrast, I was perfectly okay with:
Me: Why do you prefer Solaris?
Candidate: It's the one I'm most familiar with.
Bottom line, figure out what you want. It'll make it much easier to know when you find it.
William of Ockham had no beard. The most likely explanation is that it was chewed off by squirrels every morning.
I agree to an extent. I've found the younger ones are quicker to learn something new and more motivated to do so. On the other hand, the older people have the experience to anticipate the bumps in the road, which can be invaluable.
I've seen allot of young developers write great projects that just were not sustainable/maintainable. I've also seen the old guys write solid projects that feel like using an abacus.
If you are saying one is better than the other, I think that's just wrong either way - you definitely need a balance of both.
My next applicant after you is 23 years old.
This is a great way to create liability for your company. Age discrimination is against federal law and simply mentioning it is cause to be sued. Simply put, don't!
My next application after you has a penis. What do you and your vagina know that he and his penis doesn't? Obviously that sounds bizarre but hopefully it make my point. Asking questions which imply age is part of the equation is simply asking each applicant to sue as they leave the interview room.
Simply put, don't!
I'm 51 years old and have been a MVS, OS/390, z/OS systems programmer for going on 30 years now. Outside of the usual mainframe system administration duties I've picked up; Unix - Unix System Services under MVS. BSD, Linux Security and Encryption knowledge and experience Disaster recovery requirements. Networking at home and work. In short the job that I'm doing now I couldn't have done just a few years ago and I expect the same will be true in the future. Anyone who is still in the field for twenty or so years has to have the ability to adapt and grow.
True, but the solution is simple:
'IT is seen as a young man's game. My next applicant after you is straight out of a top 5 university CS program. What do you know that he doesn't?'
Don't forget that coding consists of 80% programming and 80% troubleshooting. You don't learn that at school. Sure, you learn how to use a debugger, but that won't help you figure out why good code doesn't work in an environment. Experience will allow people to home in on the area where the problem really is, and apply workarounds that are too rare to make it to textbooks.
What I see time and time again are young people who don't know why something is done a particular way, so they do what to them seems obvious. And break things by doing so. They may not make the same mistake a second time, but they will make it the first time. The oldtimers have already made most of their blunders, and learned the hard way why you don't do things like renaming a library to avoid it from being loaded, or putting echo/stty/tset statements in /etc/profile, or any of the pitfalls too numerous to make it into a school book.
Yes, you pay for that experience. As you should.
If you have a micro-managed environment where you can make sure that no-one is given enough rope to hang themselves (and the company) with, young IT people can be just what you need, because they are cheaper and often work hard. But if you need to give some responsibility, you might want someone who has already burnt himself and learned from it, every time.
There is no fast-track to experience or wisdom. Knowledge, yes, but that's not always a viable substitute.
I second this. I was told by my HR dept not to ask age or bring it up at all (not that I ever intended to)
Just figure out what job role you're trying to fill and dig deep into the answers you're given. Ask them their processes for debugging problems, think of issues you've had to undertake that were difficult and pose them hypothetically to figure out what the candidate would do.
Ask them a couple personality questions 'What would you old co-workers say about you?', and give them a very difficult or impossible problem to solve and see how quickly they flip out (or hopefully, not at all)
I'm 33 and I definitely think that I've got an 'edge on the younger guys who don't have the experience I do, but I know lots of people my age who shouldn't have ever been hired in IT, yet, there they are, drawing a paycheck and being worthless.
I also have known some brilliant younger people who will likely be my bosses in the future if I'm lucky.
If you start basing your decision on age, you might as well pick something just as arbitrary like skin color.
I guess what I'd say is that when I encounter someone manifestly lacking in ambition or curiosity, someone who wants to "get by", they skew distinctly older.
But it's not as if my sample size is huge. I have speculated in the past that the reason IT doesn't have a ton of really strong older workers is because they all got rich and retired, and I'm only partially kidding. Of the tip top people I know, a significant percentage have a lot of money and no longer work by choice. There has been such a boom of opportunity that all the things you want in a person - smart, communicates well, understands business, gets things done, ambitious - translate directly into real dollars, even in side projects.
They want time off to be with their families.
But they potentially compensate for that by being more "loyal" employees. People who have dependents tend to be less likely to quit their job to go looking for something else on a whim. A single twenty-something with minimal expenses might not bat an eye at jumping between jobs every year or so.
They want more time off because they've been around longer (2 weeks for new hires don't cut it).
Wow. I wouldn't take a job fresh out of college that only gave 2 weeks of vacation. When I started, 3 weeks was standard, and I thought that was merely 'acceptable'.
Xfce: Lighter than some, heavier than others. Just right.
'IT is seen as a young man's game.
Good job not bringing up age. Might I suggest, "IT is a field that requires constant learning to remain effective. My next applicant after you is straight out of a top 5 university CS program. What do you know that he doesn't?"
I'm 51 years old and have been a MVS, OS/390, z/OS systems programmer for going on 30 years now. Outside of the usual mainframe system administration duties I've picked up; Unix - Unix System Services under MVS. BSD, Linux Security and Encryption knowledge and experience Disaster recovery requirements. Networking at home and work. In short the job that I'm doing now I couldn't have done just a few years ago and I expect the same will be true in the future. Anyone who is still in the field for twenty or so years has to have the ability to adapt and grow.
Wow! There are a lot of us old bastards around! 8-)
It's hard to get into a monoculture shop (like head to the grindstone ), however the good part is that I no longer want to work in those places. The really interesting jobs are actually pretty easy to get when no matter what they ask about, you can say "Yeah, I did " to almost anything they want (and not be lying).
Another advantage is that even if you pay a guy twice what you could get a grad for, if he understands a half-dozen or more of your systems, and you can skip hiring more warm bodies, you're still money ahead.
Exactly. Also dear readers, watch out for low/high IDs in relation to the content of each post. I bet you can judge which side of the fence they'll be on before reading.
You are just playing games with the interviewees by showing them how clever you are.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
having been on both sides of the interviewing process, some of the statements here seriously scare me: What is this discussion about? Support on how to conduct interviews and hire appropriate people? fair enough, bring it on. But hey, does no-one find some of those thoughts at least a little bit strange? "Although I'm very much focused on choosing the right person for the role regardless of age, experience or whatever..." what is this supposed to mean? Of course experience is a major factor. Amongst others. And most likely there is a correlation of some kind between age and maturity and experience. Generally speaking. But lets not focus on age. Focus on experience. But that, of course is far harder to detect. "probably fair to say the more mature applicants will get a more sympathetic hearing from me than they might from most other interviewers" Why should they? That is as saying I give women, Chinese, disabled a more sympathetic hearing. Why? Just treat them all equally. "I ask older applicants to get them to demonstrate the value of their experience?" Why would they have to prove that they are more valuable than younger ones? I dont get it. "What should I be asking of the more experienced applicants, and what responses should I be looking out for?" Ok, this is the only valid question in the entire paragraph. And even this - by the way it is asked - seems to suggest you have no idea what you are talking about. Why this makes me scared is that clearly people who have no idea about recruitment and judging someones fit for a role - in an interview process - are tasked with the role. Can we please educate those people better? For the sake of potential employees and companies. Sorry if I am being hard here, have just seen too many such situations go wrong to mutual disadvantage.
"You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike...what do you do?"
My answer to that is: Take off all my clothes and start doing jumping jacks while singing Barry Manilow.
If someone else comes along, they're going to take one look at that and run for the exit. All I need to do is follow the scent of fear.
My favorite IT question is "vi or emacs?"
If they look at you funny or don't have an answer, they should not be hired.
It doesn't really matter which they prefer, just that they prefer one or the other. I would even accept "BBEdit over NFS or AFS", but if the person can't edit a text file on a remote system, they are all but worthless.
I also like to always ask one question that nobody can answer. If they lie and make up an answer, don't hire them. If they say "I don't know" or "Here's where I'd find the answer to that", they can probably be trusted.
Amaturs talk about languages, noobs talk about algrothims, pros talk about version control.