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So, you go for a job interview on Monday. You show up an hour early, to show your enthusiasm, and to hedge your bets on traffic. You're wearing your favorite shirt. You meet the interviewer, and he seems nice enough. He starts asking you Java questions. If you were more introspective, or maybe less desperate, you'd begin to notice that you don't know the answers. Not really any of them. But you keep talking, somehow. You start to theorize about what the answers to the questions might be, if the questions were different in ways that made them easier for you. You don't realize at first that you're wrong about those, too. The interview concludes. You didn't really get much time to ask questions, except for the really important one on your mind: What is this job you're interviewing for? The interviewer describes the position and the group, but you don't really understand, so you nod. He shows you out. The week goes by, and on Friday you still haven't heard anything. The interviewer said to wait 7 days for a response, but you call him anyway. It's clear from the phone conversation (which is very short) that he doesn't remember you. He tells you that he'll check with HR right away and that they'll follow up. You hang up, wondering if you'll get the job. You're pretty sure you will. |
i hate interviews.
so what are you looking for? i thought you had a good job n stuff.
we could allways use more rock smashers in sierra leone.
Posted by: grayson at December 11, 2004 01:46 AMWell, in that particular situation I was the interview-er, not the interview-ee. We're trying to grow our staff, but it's hard work to find good people.
In particular, it's so painful to interview all of these people who come in for jobs they KNOW they are not qualified for. It makes me cringe, because it's pretty awkward to ask a question with a clear, straight-forward answer, and then watch the candidate struggle to use up the hour without saying anything.
Posted by: Rus at December 12, 2004 10:42 AMHaving done a crapload of interviews for designers lately, all I can say is that there are an astounding number of two groups of people out there:
-- twentysomething computer science grads who've just realized they hate programming and want to be graphics guys, and maybe used Photoshop once to give a photo a drop shadow.
-- fortysomething guys who had a design job in their twenties, quit after a few years to 'go freelance' (ie, have a lot of kids), got divorced, and are looking to get into the market again.
That's funny, when we were looking for an Interaction Designer we had the opposite problem: we wanted someone with some experience working with applications, but all we could find were arty people who wanted to put a blue swoosh on everything, but didn't know how to design anything more complex than a static web page.
Maybe we should trade job descriptions... :)
Posted by: Rus at December 17, 2004 10:02 PM