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Making Sure Interviews Don't Turn Into Free Consulting
We've talked in the past about what kind of questions should be asked of potential developer hires, and how being honest in exit interviews probably isn't worth the potential damage to your career. We're also familiar with the tricky questions some interviewers like to throw at people to test their thinking skills, and the questionable merits of gauging somebody's skillset through a pointlessly obtuse math problem. But there are also shady employers who conduct interviews to try to mine your knowledge and experience to find free solutions to their current problems. An actual job may or may not be on the table, but if they can get what they need from you before hiring, then at the very least your bargaining position will have gotten worse. Have you dealt with situations like this in the past? Since you can't know for sure the interviewer's intentions, it's tough to provide an answer demonstrating your abilities without solving their problem. "Before asking about the fixes they’ve tried, start by acknowledging the depth of the problem and find out whether the manager has the resources to solve it. Then, just like a consultant, use their answers to highlight your experience and explain the approach you’d take." You could also try explaining how you've solved similar problems, which won't necessarily help them, but will demonstrate your value. Of course, one of the biggest challenges is determining when somebody is getting a little too specific with their interview questions. What red flags should people keep an eye out for?
"Before asking about the fixes they’ve tried, start by acknowledging the depth of the problem and find out whether the manager has the resources to solve it. Then, just like a consultant, use their answers to highlight your experience and explain the approach you’d take." You could also try explaining how you've solved similar problems, which won't necessarily help them, but will demonstrate your value. Of course, one of the biggest challenges is determining when somebody is getting a little too specific with their interview questions.
Is this serious? Here's a big red warning sign for me: if my job can be jeopardized by twenty minutes of talking, I'm probably in the wrong industry. I can tell you how to implement a solution but it's the actual work and planning and care that should be paid for cash money.
What red flags should people keep an eye out for?
Here's a red flag: What company out there is so full of morons that they go to interviewees for direction? Man, if I ever got that feeling in an interview, I wouldn't want to work for them anyway and I'd walk away laughing when they try to turn small talk into a business plan! Is this why "consulting" is so stupid? They can have all the free advice they want, it's still going to shit out half way through when they go, "Okay we have hadoop and lucene, what was that 'blur' thing he was talking about?" or "Okay, we've built a rails app with the generator and scaffolds ... now what did he say about creating database migrations?" and on and on.
I mean, are there actually people out there that feel their job can be compromised by handing over thirty minutes of talking to a potential employer? The only thing I'd be worried about is if they started asking me to name names for other people they could hire.
My work here is dung.
only programmers and IT geeks would be so conceited as to even think this is a possibility.
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
I think the goal is to avoid wasting your time waiting to see if they're going to offer you a job, or to avoid accepting a job by a company like that if they do make an offer.
Um, yeah, no. Conversely you might have just sat through a potentially great job interview acting like you think you've got a royal flush and being careful not to show it. Yeah ... I'm not taking that risk. If you ask me in a job interview "How do you solve X" I am just going to turn on the firehose and let you have it to show you that I've got ideas for solving problems, I can openly confidently communicate said solutions well and I have dealt with problems like this in the past. If you can write all that down fast enough and follow through on something that normally takes a team six months to implement then good for you, you deserve that hail Mary pass that you somehow caught. Good luck on building a career off of hilarious asshattery like that. Your life must be "Weekend at Bernies" nine to five.
My work here is dung.
Strictly speaking, this wasn't an interview; but I think it applies.
Many many many moons ago, a friend asked me if I would be interested in setting up a Novell network for his employer. I put together a quote and sent it off. He called me up, and said that he needed a detailed walk-through of the work involved in order to explain the quote to his boss. I explained everything that was necessary. A couple of weeks go by, and I haven't heard anything so I call him. After learning what needed to be done, he decided he could do it himself; and that was the route they were taking. Lost a 'friend', but gained a cautionary tale; I think I came out ahead. (Yes, Jeff; this story is about you.)
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My guess is this stems from interviews where the hiring side asks questions about a problem they recently solved, then someone who gave a great answer didn't get hired because someone else was a better fit for the job. So the "great answer" person thinks the company was trolling for solutions.
I encounter this kind of attitude all the time: People who want to fight tooth and nail to hold on to whatever vital information they think they have, so they can't be replaced. They want to make sure nobody else learns how to do it, because otherwise they think they'd be laid off.
Thing is? They are often right, because they aren't very useful outside of that.
Personally I think it is silly. My boss always says we IT types should be trying to work ourselves out of a job. He doesn't mean he wants to get rid of us (he's a tech guy, not a PHB) just that we, including him, should always be working for better automation, working to solve problem, working to streamline and make service better.
The thing is that won't end up with us being out of a job because there's always more to do. There are things people would like us to do, but we don't have time for, and if we free up more time we can move on to that.
Not everyone operates that way though. They want to hold on to whatever little niche of knowledge they have, believing that is all that makes them valuable.
I'm a pharmaceutical scientist and have personally experienced this last year. A biotechnology company flew me across the country and picked my brain to explain how to setup and analyze and characterize proteins by liquid chromatography mass spectrometry. Different people asked me the same questions over and over again inquiring about setting up the mass spectrometer acquisition parameters. I even tried to explain other relevant experience, they didn't want to hear it, all they wanted was to know how to acquire the data to identify as many proteins as possible in a series of samples.
One interview I had amused me. On paper it looked okay, a small art dealership was looking for a combined sysadmin/Perl programmer which was pretty much what I was doing then, and the pay was significantly more than I was on at my current place and as I was getting bored in the current job anyway I thought I'd go and have a chat.
Went to the interview and it was one of those where the interviewer wasn't actually technical himself. He had a friend write a page of simple technical questions which I answered without any trouble, also corrected one of the answers he had. The interviewer seemed happy and we started talking about what the job actually involved, and here it started to go wrong. He wanted a basic browse-only shopfront, no actual payment, with basic message board capability, and some everyday web/email/DNS handling. He did vaguely ask how I'd do this but not in any detail at all. Listening to him I knew that I'd be bored by day two, but I did actually like the guy and knew that what he wanted really didn't need a full-time employee. I explained to him that these were basically things which could be done by using pre-existing software with a month of effort to get it up and running in the first place, and a day or so a month afterwards to maintain it. I jotted down the names of some software and companies that could help him, and told him what to ask them for.
He was genuinely amazed. He thought that all of this web-stuff was so complex that it'd be a full-time task to keep his website running, thinking that every new art piece he added to the catalogue would need an entire new page to be written for it. Finding out about CMS was a revelation, and one he was grateful for, and all this took less time than the interview was scheduled for.
In the end he went with one of the companies I'd recommended to him, they did ecommerce stuff and this was bread and butter for them, he was up and running in two weeks with everything he needed, as he let me know in an email. As for me I didn't have a new job but I felt good about myself, and the fact the chap had basically ended the 'interview' by giving me a few weeks worth of wages for saving him a lot in the long run was quite nice too.
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It was just to find out about a project and give them a quote. It turns out that I solved their issue in about 30 minutes, including chit chat, and told them everything they needed to know to fix their problem. I even made notes on their materials for them.
You know what I charged them? Nothing. I told them if they had to come back and have me do everything, it would be about $X, but that I thought that they had enough information to do it with the people they already had on board. They're a client I'm unlikely to ever see again because this is an unusual problem for them. They're not going to be repeat freeloaders, and doing this work full-up won't get me a bigger job with them later.
I figure that if I can solve your entire problem in 30 minutes, it's not something that requires my skill or justifies my fees. I'd rather have a happy non-client telling their friends that I was extremely helpful (yes, I made them promise not let people know I just gave them the info for free), than clients who just spent a healthy dime because they felt they had no other option. I do have "regulars" who have stupid issues like this on a recurring basis. I charge them full rack rate every time.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
In early 1989, I was called for an interview at CERN. The guy who interviewed me was called Tim. He asked me to call him Timbo. The interview went normally and then Timbo took me to the CERN cafeteria for lunch. I told him about my idea about taking hypertext and connecting it to the Transmission Control Protocol and domain name system ideas andâ"ta-da!â"you all know what happened next.