Employment Gaps

[Lorizael]

They didn't ask about any employment gaps. But god do I hate interviews. This one involved 4 different people and lasted an hour and forty minutes.

[loinburger]

How did you do?

[Elok]

They liked him enough to tie up four paid employees' time for a total of at least an hour and forty minutes.

[Lorizael]

I survived? I don't know. I'm terrible at answering "Can you think of an instance in which you and a coworker were trapped on a desert island and needed to use your teamwork skills and customer-facing attitude to recruit dolphins in order to escape the island and how did you approach that situation?" questions. Especially an hour and forty minutes of those.

[Elok]

I'd like to believe you just made that specific question up, but I really can't be sure.

[loinburger]

Blargh. I mostly get stupid questions like "you're in a room with three switches with a one to one correspondence with three lightbulbs in another room, you can manipulate the switches in any way you want, you can't see the room with the lightbulbs from the room with the switches, once you leave the room with the switches you can't re-enter it, how do you determine which switches correspond to which lightbulbs." (This is an actual interview question I was asked a couple of weeks ago.) If anybody said anything like "customer-facing" in an interview I think I'd have to walk out.

Spoiler:

Turn on two lightbulbs and leave them on for ten minutes or so, then turn off one of them. The lit bulb corresponds to the switch that's on, the unlit bulb that's warm corresponds to the switch that you turned on and then turned off, the unlit bulb that's cold corresponds to the switch that you left of.

[rah]

Better to have dumb logic questions where there's a real right answer than bullcrap behavioral questions that are not used to hire but to eliminate.
But having said that, I use them in interviews quite a bit.

I had one guy take ten minutes to answer one where his entire answer was raging against authority figures.
He actually thought he aced it.
Needless to say, no followup interview for him.

[loinburger]

My biggest beef with the dumb logic questions is that they don't have much to do with programming, but they have a helluva lot more to do with programming than the bullcrap behavioral questions do.

To be fair, the only interview I ever walked out on was the one where the guy kept criticizing me for failing to put semicolons at the end of all of my statements on a whiteboard pseudocoding question. ("pseudocode" meaning that syntax shouldn't matter so long as it's more or less consistent.) I'm willing to put up with a lot of bull**** if it might land me a nice salary.

[rah]

I use a lot of SAS where the semicolon is the statement delimiter.

I've seen some real rigorous tests for programmers. I'll ask a few what experience questions then maybe use a logic or programming questions if I find their experience answers unconvincing.
But they're usually really basic coding questions.

[loinburger]

I had an interview with Google a few months ago that was extremely rigorous - lots of graph theory questions (which I did fine on) and a systems programming question (which I bombed). Mostly though I get asked questions about experience - do I know this and that framework, have I used this and that database, etc.

[Aeson]

Blargh. I mostly get stupid questions like "you're in a room with three switches with a one to one correspondence with three lightbulbs in another room, you can manipulate the switches in any way you want, you can't see the room with the lightbulbs from the room with the switches, once you leave the room with the switches you can't re-enter it, how do you determine which switches correspond to which lightbulbs." (This is an actual interview question I was asked a couple of weeks ago.) If anybody said anything like "customer-facing" in an interview I think I'd have to walk out.

Spoiler:

Turn on two lightbulbs and leave them on for ten minutes or so, then turn off one of them. The lit bulb corresponds to the switch that's on, the unlit bulb that's warm corresponds to the switch that you turned on and then turned off, the unlit bulb that's cold corresponds to the switch that you left of.

Ask an intern to do it while I focus on important work.

[rah]

Does that trick even work with LED lights now.

[loinburger]

It would still work, you'd just need to leave the light on for a lot longer than with an incandescent (LEDs would need to be 100% efficient for the trick to not work)

[Lorizael]

Can you think of an instance in which you and a coworker were trapped on a desert island and needed to use your teamwork skills and customer-facing attitude to recruit dolphins in order to escape the island and how did you approach that situation?

Spoiler:

While your coworker is distracted trying to talk to dolphins, bash his skull in. Now you have food for several weeks. Be careful not to eat his brains, because there is no cure for spongiform encephalopathy.