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.
Re:Hey, remember when Ender's Game was good?
on
Ender in Exile
·
· Score: 4, Funny
No where did I say someone should do anything that would be illegal.
In my case it definitely *was* legal, but was something that personally bothered me on a moral level. Consider it a grey area where the law was definitely on the side of my employer but something you know in your heart just doesn't feel right. Like I stated earlier a lot of people might not even have given a second thought to it, but I had a different viewpoint because of my experiences up to that point.
Having been put in a position once before that an employer asked me to do something I found to be frankly quite lacking in a moral nature here's what I ultimately decided to do.
After considering the work for a while, both why I didn't feel like performing the work personally and why the company desired this functionality I finally decided to do the work, but inform my boss and his boss that I was uncomfortable creating this before hand and giving them clear notice of the whys.
Firstly I did the work because it was simply my job and I had signed onto the job. It's something a *lot* of people might not have given a second thought to creating, obviously as they both had no problems with the work since they asked me to continue even after raising my concerns. Secondly because it wasn't really "that bad" and having steady income of cash dolladolla bills allows me to have nice things like somewhere to live and food I wanted to see if it was something I was over-reacting to.
After completion? Yep, I still felt like shit. So I gave them my notice and told them in the my resignation letter why I was leaving and referred them to the early notification of my objections. So, for me, it was a good learning experience about myself and having done it in this manner I have no problem explaining it to future employers as my reason for leaving this particular job.
And the chicken did come down from the mountain, and as he came down he let loose a mighty gurggle that let all the dinosaurs know it was time. Jesus was born.
The very stars began to twinkle as styx, the band, started to play a cover of pink floyd's wish you were here (dontchaknow that just got all the pigs excited) and then JEsus he did come down.
Below his mighty man legs of girth was none other than a TREX bathed in sweet sweet black oil. Jesus struck a match, to light his smokes, and the oil arose in a fire of cleansing for all the dirty users of the linux. And HARK what do we hear? JEsus has begun to speak to us, to impart his wisdom for our humanity to grow upon:
Whichever "college educated" marketeer or MBA decided it would be a good idea for/. to post this sort of drivel, clearly is so out of touch with the base concept of reality that no amount of coke in those short bathroom visits, or quick suck-n-ducks in a meeting room or even glorious tee times on sunday could ever hope to bring them back to the solid reality that the average slashdot poster inhabits.
In other words, you are a fucking idiot. Please. Please. Do not breed.
How about we just pretend these two idle postings to the front page never happened and return to our usual flaming of microsoft, apple, and wondering when esr is going to start using a proper deodorant.
Slashdot refuses to fix the non-sexy things, in the true spirit of open source. Quite obvious that most of the development work done on./ is done by people who have never had to actually deliver a product on any sort of timeframe. Yeah, yeah, don't like it, don't read here. Unfortunately the mindshare of both good and terrible bad (ie hilarious) posters is still here with no other tech based discussion forums able to wrest it away, even after all these years.
Hell I'd even consider subscribing if the editors could keep their "witty" comments to themselves or give us an option for viewing submissions without editor comments. Or hey, modify the system to have two types of editor comments, correction (factual updates) and editorial and the ability to turn one or both off.
Insert sarcasm or relevant tags wherever needed above.
Outside of a few exceptions google has managed to quite quickly develop an intense monoculture of people afraid to buck the system or trends. This is to be expected with rapid growth; too bad for them.
Porn. People do pay much higher sums for rather obscure or taboo things.
The problem with the "long tail" is that companies assumed it scaled. By definition it will only apply to a fringe. There is only space in such fringe areas for one or two dominant players; these players may make gobs of cash, but only in relation to their market size.
Of course large vendors aren't going to find it profitable to appeal to multiple fringe markets. The level of effort involved to support each individual small market is high and then combined with a number of markets means you end up burning through more manpower per dollar than a smaller dedicated company. It's the same problem of having too many products/SKUs/whatever, see DEC/Apple pre Jobs for an example of failing this way.
The problem with this particular example from P&T (who are awesome despite doing this from time to time) is that this isn't an appeal to find a concrete value or fact, it is instead an appeal to a person's knowledge. Just like the questions asking about weapons of mass destruction were framed in a manner which directly appealed to the information people were being fed by the administration and in turn the media.
Had the questions been framed more like "If Iraq possesses weapons of mass destruction that could reach Iran? Should we invade?" (Which is a false and leading appeal like most poll questions) you can bet most of the Americans who agreed with the invasion would have said, "No."
The polling system in the US is greatly flawed, yet many people quote the stats from polls without actually reading the questions. Ever wonder why so many Americans believe in god? Because the typical poll question asks about a higher power rather than any sort of identifiable god. The responder is then primed for the followups.
Before quoting a poll, make sure you know what the questions actually asked, you may be surprised.
Outside the Bay it might note known, but there is a running joke about the coming downfall of Google from within due to it's arrogance. Google actually doesn't pay that well and uses a *lot* of 3rd party contractors who make shit on the hope of coming onto google for real.
What's really terrible is Google operates with a quit long interview process, often with a number of people. These people are all very similar and have huge chips on their shoulder and only look to hire people much like themselves. That is people from academia with not too much real market experience. They are quickly becoming a very self referential mono-culture of people who genuinely believe they are better, but without the actual experience to back it up. A telling sign is their over reliance on logic puzzle interviews, raw information queries and needing to gel solidly with a large number of people. They ask very few "how would you do X" or "how do you deal with Y" questions, instead thinking that the raw intelligence is the best feature to grade an applicant on.
Anyone who has dealt with tech "darlings" knows the danger of this. Sure they may be smart as fuck, but it doesn't mean they know how to finish or deliver. It may be hard for the slashdot poster to believe but people used to dream of working at microsoft (and before that IBM) the way they talk about google now. It's just another cycle.
We can do without your unfunny and snippy comments. Besides what do you actually know about working in a more traditional workplace? AFAIK you never have.
The slashdot editors continue to be a hilarious joke for all the wrong reasons. You guys have no idea what a parody of actual people who work in the tech industry you have become with your snide and quite out of date comments. It's like you guys are still stuck in 2001 and while I do quite enjoy the farce sometimes, others it just strikes me as sad.
Perhaps you should try hiring some editors who have actually worked in the tech field on things other than silly blogs or some open source project that was never completed?
As far as upper management is concerned you have now gone on floating contract for a prepaid four week period. They absolutely don't care what you do to fill your time. However, during this window they expect you to be available for any knowledge transfer or training that should arise by you no longer doing your day to day or longer term tasks.
Wanna learn something new? Got some books to read? Near a park? Enjoy it!
A security clearance of Secret is much easier to obtain than many expect. Top Secret can also be obtained somewhat easily, even given a set of questionable actions in the past, based on good interviews with people from your sphere of influence. Special allowance cases are made all the time for either. Many people assume (wrongly) that a past arrest or drug use immediately rule out either. The important parts here are complete honesty, showing a changed "nature" if needed and that your versions of past events match up with other witnesses.
As someone who purchased 2-3 cellphones a year before the iphone I feel pretty confident in saying that it is a game changing device. Perhaps not in such an obvious way. Moving to the iphone meant giving up a number of features of some of my other phones so the process was somewhat wary and filled with being willing to give up a few things. However, that said, the interface on the iphone, from your basic interaction to the polish of the built in Applications and OS (not to mention the amazing 3rd party apps already) *is fundamentally game changing*.
How so? There's no other way to put this. The major cellphone makers had absolutely no idea how to make a decent UI on any of the more feature packed and modern phones. They are all clunky with non-intuitive features, configuration and usage sprinkled all over the place. Those who purchase high end phones for years have had to deal with this. Some even think their phone interfaces are pretty good, simply because they have become so used to the swill pushed out. The iphone has changed this completely. Now these companies understand they need to have someone other than Bob in accounting test their interfaces for usability. This is a good thing, even if you dislike the iphone. The old interfaces had no where to go but up (even though most of them just went sideways) and now they have a clear example in front of them to mimic to create a much better experience on a phone packed with features.
Slashdot Mirror
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.
screw you old man, us newbs are taking over
No where did I say someone should do anything that would be illegal.
In my case it definitely *was* legal, but was something that personally bothered me on a moral level. Consider it a grey area where the law was definitely on the side of my employer but something you know in your heart just doesn't feel right. Like I stated earlier a lot of people might not even have given a second thought to it, but I had a different viewpoint because of my experiences up to that point.
Having been put in a position once before that an employer asked me to do something I found to be frankly quite lacking in a moral nature here's what I ultimately decided to do.
After considering the work for a while, both why I didn't feel like performing the work personally and why the company desired this functionality I finally decided to do the work, but inform my boss and his boss that I was uncomfortable creating this before hand and giving them clear notice of the whys.
Firstly I did the work because it was simply my job and I had signed onto the job. It's something a *lot* of people might not have given a second thought to creating, obviously as they both had no problems with the work since they asked me to continue even after raising my concerns. Secondly because it wasn't really "that bad" and having steady income of cash dolladolla bills allows me to have nice things like somewhere to live and food I wanted to see if it was something I was over-reacting to.
After completion? Yep, I still felt like shit. So I gave them my notice and told them in the my resignation letter why I was leaving and referred them to the early notification of my objections. So, for me, it was a good learning experience about myself and having done it in this manner I have no problem explaining it to future employers as my reason for leaving this particular job.
me2
And the chicken did come down from the mountain, and as he came down he let loose a mighty gurggle that let all the dinosaurs know it was time. Jesus was born.
The very stars began to twinkle as styx, the band, started to play a cover of pink floyd's wish you were here (dontchaknow that just got all the pigs excited) and then JEsus he did come down.
Below his mighty man legs of girth was none other than a TREX bathed in sweet sweet black oil. Jesus struck a match, to light his smokes, and the oil arose in a fire of cleansing for all the dirty users of the linux. And HARK what do we hear? JEsus has begun to speak to us, to impart his wisdom for our humanity to grow upon:
"YALL FUKRS DUM LOLZ"
IDLE: AM I DOING IT RIGHT??!!!?!?
Whichever "college educated" marketeer or MBA decided it would be a good idea for /. to post this sort of drivel, clearly is so out of touch with the base concept of reality that no amount of coke in those short bathroom visits, or quick suck-n-ducks in a meeting room or even glorious tee times on sunday could ever hope to bring them back to the solid reality that the average slashdot poster inhabits.
In other words, you are a fucking idiot. Please. Please. Do not breed.
How about we just pretend these two idle postings to the front page never happened and return to our usual flaming of microsoft, apple, and wondering when esr is going to start using a proper deodorant.
Seriously? Guys? This is complete FAIL.
Trolling USENET was an art on to itself. The alt.config.X wars were quite stellar.
This is how I did it you cracklin' ass whippersnappers.
WTF would the plus have meant otherwise?
Not going to happen.
Slashdot refuses to fix the non-sexy things, in the true spirit of open source. Quite obvious that most of the development work done on ./ is done by people who have never had to actually deliver a product on any sort of timeframe. Yeah, yeah, don't like it, don't read here. Unfortunately the mindshare of both good and terrible bad (ie hilarious) posters is still here with no other tech based discussion forums able to wrest it away, even after all these years.
Hell I'd even consider subscribing if the editors could keep their "witty" comments to themselves or give us an option for viewing submissions without editor comments. Or hey, modify the system to have two types of editor comments, correction (factual updates) and editorial and the ability to turn one or both off.
Insert sarcasm or relevant tags wherever needed above.
,,, Microsoft's is (was?).
Outside of a few exceptions google has managed to quite quickly develop an intense monoculture of people afraid to buck the system or trends. This is to be expected with rapid growth; too bad for them.
Porn. People do pay much higher sums for rather obscure or taboo things.
The problem with the "long tail" is that companies assumed it scaled. By definition it will only apply to a fringe. There is only space in such fringe areas for one or two dominant players; these players may make gobs of cash, but only in relation to their market size.
Of course large vendors aren't going to find it profitable to appeal to multiple fringe markets. The level of effort involved to support each individual small market is high and then combined with a number of markets means you end up burning through more manpower per dollar than a smaller dedicated company. It's the same problem of having too many products/SKUs/whatever, see DEC/Apple pre Jobs for an example of failing this way.
Nearly every one of them said yes.
The problem with this particular example from P&T (who are awesome despite doing this from time to time) is that this isn't an appeal to find a concrete value or fact, it is instead an appeal to a person's knowledge. Just like the questions asking about weapons of mass destruction were framed in a manner which directly appealed to the information people were being fed by the administration and in turn the media.
Had the questions been framed more like "If Iraq possesses weapons of mass destruction that could reach Iran? Should we invade?" (Which is a false and leading appeal like most poll questions) you can bet most of the Americans who agreed with the invasion would have said, "No."
The polling system in the US is greatly flawed, yet many people quote the stats from polls without actually reading the questions. Ever wonder why so many Americans believe in god? Because the typical poll question asks about a higher power rather than any sort of identifiable god. The responder is then primed for the followups.
Before quoting a poll, make sure you know what the questions actually asked, you may be surprised.
That's what your MOM said.
Oh... wait...
Outside the Bay it might note known, but there is a running joke about the coming downfall of Google from within due to it's arrogance. Google actually doesn't pay that well and uses a *lot* of 3rd party contractors who make shit on the hope of coming onto google for real.
What's really terrible is Google operates with a quit long interview process, often with a number of people. These people are all very similar and have huge chips on their shoulder and only look to hire people much like themselves. That is people from academia with not too much real market experience. They are quickly becoming a very self referential mono-culture of people who genuinely believe they are better, but without the actual experience to back it up. A telling sign is their over reliance on logic puzzle interviews, raw information queries and needing to gel solidly with a large number of people. They ask very few "how would you do X" or "how do you deal with Y" questions, instead thinking that the raw intelligence is the best feature to grade an applicant on.
Anyone who has dealt with tech "darlings" knows the danger of this. Sure they may be smart as fuck, but it doesn't mean they know how to finish or deliver. It may be hard for the slashdot poster to believe but people used to dream of working at microsoft (and before that IBM) the way they talk about google now. It's just another cycle.
We can do without your unfunny and snippy comments. Besides what do you actually know about working in a more traditional workplace? AFAIK you never have.
The slashdot editors continue to be a hilarious joke for all the wrong reasons. You guys have no idea what a parody of actual people who work in the tech industry you have become with your snide and quite out of date comments. It's like you guys are still stuck in 2001 and while I do quite enjoy the farce sometimes, others it just strikes me as sad.
Perhaps you should try hiring some editors who have actually worked in the tech field on things other than silly blogs or some open source project that was never completed?
amazon.com.myserver.net as a dns record too
OLD CROTCHETY MAN MODE:
HOST RECORD
The BMW MSeries would like to respectfully disagree.
(disclaimer: I drive an audi)
As far as upper management is concerned you have now gone on floating contract for a prepaid four week period. They absolutely don't care what you do to fill your time. However, during this window they expect you to be available for any knowledge transfer or training that should arise by you no longer doing your day to day or longer term tasks.
Wanna learn something new? Got some books to read? Near a park? Enjoy it!
If people are really interested in you, you shouldn't have to shove content down their throats.
I heard that before, and actually believed it for a few years.
A few years... *laugh* ahh the arrogance of youth, thinking you know it all.
Wisdom is going to be fun for you, should give you plenty of stinging regrets.
A security clearance of Secret is much easier to obtain than many expect. Top Secret can also be obtained somewhat easily, even given a set of questionable actions in the past, based on good interviews with people from your sphere of influence. Special allowance cases are made all the time for either. Many people assume (wrongly) that a past arrest or drug use immediately rule out either. The important parts here are complete honesty, showing a changed "nature" if needed and that your versions of past events match up with other witnesses.
No, this is not an example of the big lie, you are clearly reaching.
As someone who purchased 2-3 cellphones a year before the iphone I feel pretty confident in saying that it is a game changing device. Perhaps not in such an obvious way. Moving to the iphone meant giving up a number of features of some of my other phones so the process was somewhat wary and filled with being willing to give up a few things. However, that said, the interface on the iphone, from your basic interaction to the polish of the built in Applications and OS (not to mention the amazing 3rd party apps already) *is fundamentally game changing*.
How so? There's no other way to put this. The major cellphone makers had absolutely no idea how to make a decent UI on any of the more feature packed and modern phones. They are all clunky with non-intuitive features, configuration and usage sprinkled all over the place. Those who purchase high end phones for years have had to deal with this. Some even think their phone interfaces are pretty good, simply because they have become so used to the swill pushed out. The iphone has changed this completely. Now these companies understand they need to have someone other than Bob in accounting test their interfaces for usability. This is a good thing, even if you dislike the iphone. The old interfaces had no where to go but up (even though most of them just went sideways) and now they have a clear example in front of them to mimic to create a much better experience on a phone packed with features.