"Stupid Interview Questions" Follow-up · Sat May 20, 06:31 PM

I had a couple of interesting thoughts, and a happy one (for the benefit of my regular readers, all eight of you, since I’m sure traffic will die off real quicksmile).

First off, I was browsing through logs to see who-all had linked to my post, and I found an interesting discussion on the topic over on Reddit. It’s great to see that some people had a fascinating conversation on the topic, but…it’d be even nicer if Reddit had some way to automagically notify the original poster, or annotate the original post (via comment or whatever) that the conversation existed. A bit more “webbish” in spirit. So I’ve added a link to that conversation to a comment on the original post.

Secondly, both in the comments on my post and in that conversation on Reddit, there were some comments that indicated disagreement and/or unhappiness with my approach. I find that to be a good thing. If someone took umbrage at my answers, then A) they’d probably be unhappy if I actually worked with them, and B) I’d probably be unhappy if I actually worked with them. In that case, the question and answer(s) serve their intended purpose admirably—that is, to screen out hires who wouldn’t work out. The person who said I was ”...probably not stable/smart enough to be hired in anything above a graduate technical post” would definitely not get along with me day to day. I mean, I may not be entirely stable, and I’ve been known to show a sharp sense of humor, but I do develop some mean software *cool*.

I will say, though, that there was one individual who seemed to have taken things rather personally. Either that, or he or she just had a really bad day. This person made one slightly snarky comment, but it was perfectly on topic, so I was happy to clear it and respond. Same person then made a second comment that went far beyond snark, well into nasty territory, and was completely off-topic to boot. I actually pondered for a while whether I should clear the comment, feeling some editorial responsibility, but then I decided that if people wanted to read off-topic flamewars, they’d be hanging out on Usenet, not reading edited blogs (hey, it’s the first time I’ve actually had to deal with traffic to my blog :P). I did send the person a reply via e-mail, with an honest attempt to take the comment at what non-spiteful face value it contained, and asked him or her if I had pissed them off in some way, but I didn’t get a reply. My pet theory is that this person asks the file-copy question in interviews, and didn’t appreciate my answer wink.

Finally, there were apparently a lot of people who got some enjoyment and humor value from my post, which in turn made me happy to have contributed to the net (no pun intended) happiness of the Internet. Woot! *big grin*

-- David --

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  1. Sorry this is off-topic, but have you checked out www.live365.com for free music (if you don’t mind the ads). It’s great, and has nearly everything you can imagine. You can also set up your own broadcasting station (tho that’s not free, I think). Thank you for the music links!


    — mama cat    Thursday June 8, 2006    #

  2. I found your post quite funny, and while it would probably piss me off a little if our conversation went exactly along those lines, I would take it as a sign of experience that you could identify the edge cases.

    Co-incidentally, I just blogged about the value of interview questions as two-way filters:

    http://weblog.raganwald.com/2006/06/my-favourite-interview-question.html

    Warm regards…


    — Reg Braithwaite    Monday June 12, 2006    #

   


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