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Mr. Ed states “…Recently I have had the misfortune to be playing the interview circuit again; parading from one interrogation to the next like some prisoner of technical war. The experience has been both frustrating and humiliating - and unpleasant reminder of how appallingly most technical interviews are conducted. ”

After reading his post I was chuckling because I’ve seen so much of this in my own recent interviews. I especially loved the one where I went to Herbalife to be grilled for almost 4 hours by a panel of 4 and came across no less than 2 of the very creative unsolvable questions that Ed mentioned in his post. I threw it back at the interviewer by asking whose idea it was to use Joel Spolsky’s blog as a pattern for an interview. I guess I really wasn’t making any friends when I proceeded to say “Lets see now if I remember correctly Spolsky stated that I shouldn’t be flustered right here but instead come up with some hair brained creative solution to the problem. ” I guess that might have ticked the hiring manager off a bit.

I have also been on the other side of the coin when I hired people myself and yes I was guilty of the MVC issue - only in my case its the question of “Do you know what a Front Controller is? ”

Generally I find interviewers fall into 2 categories. Thsoe that conduct antagonistic interviews and those that dont. I never tried to antagonize candidates, 95% of the questions I’ve asked were based on my own experience and lessons learned in the school of hard knocks. I didnt expect people to have all the answers and was much more interested in seeing if a person can reason.

Anyways, Mr. Ed I feel ya.

In the end I suppose I should count my blessings that I havent been drilled by Microsoft with some of their famous questions.

Hacknot