On Sat, Jul 07, 2012 at 02:06:58PM +1000, Matthew Palmer wrote:
On Sat, Jul 07, 2012 at 12:51:55PM +1200, Ben Aitchison wrote:
On Fri, Jul 06, 2012 at 04:18:21PM +1000, Matthew Palmer wrote:
On Thu, Jul 05, 2012 at 05:01:39PM -0700, Scott Weeks wrote:
--- jason@thebaughers.com wrote: From: Jason Baugher <jason@thebaughers.com>
Geez, I'd be happy to find someone with a good attitude, a solid work ethic, and the desire and aptitude to learn. :) ---------------------------------------
Yeah, that. But how do you get those folks through the HR process to you, so you can decipher their skill/work ethic level? What can the HR person ask to find out if someone has these qualities? OSPF LSA type questions will not help.
Don't get HR to do that sort of screening. They suck mightily at it. I lack any sort of HR department to get in the way, and I'm glad of it -- I don't see the value in having someone who doesn't know anything about the job get in the way of finding the right person for it. Sure, get 'em to do the scutwork of posting job ads, collating resumes, scheduling things and sending the "lolz no!" responses, but actually filtering? Nah, I'll do that bit thanks. If you have to have HR do a filter call, make it *really* simple, like "What does TCP stand for?" -- sadly, you'll still probably filter out half the applicants for a senior position...
I've noticed a strong correlation between people who don't know what acronyms stand for, and competence. People who don't know anything try and figure out what the acronym stands for - people who want to understand things see it as just a place holder.
[...]
Maybe it's more significant to ask what the difference between TCP and UDP is.
Yes, the difference between TCP and UDP is a much better question to ask, but having HR assess and act on the answer to the question is a whole hell of a lot harder. In many ways, *that's* the tough bit of finding a good screening question. <snip> Indeed. I was once filtered out of a sysadmin job at a big search engine company. They asked questions like: What system call does the ls command make? I didn't know, but said you could read the source or strace to find out.
They asked me to describe what ARP is. I basically talked about what an ARP table is and went into detail about "who-has" requests for building the table etc... and more questions like that. They seemed lost and didn't seem to know what I was talking about. It was at this point I realized that I was talking to an HR screener. The conversation was awkward from this point on as I struggled to attempt to guess what might be on the piece of paper as "The Right Answer". Needless to say I didn't hear back. Was I what they were looking for? Maybe, maybe not. But I was screened out before either of us could find out. Just as well, I'm much happier where I am now. :-)
Finding good interview questions *in general* isn't all that hard. With a good senior candidate my interview questions could just be bringing up problems I've recently solved or am currently wrestling with, and having a 30 minute conversation on the problem. I'll get a very good idea of someone's domain knowledge and problem-solving skills by doing that. But there's no way I can ask HR to do that, because they don't know how to assess the answer, and as previously demonstrated ("fragmented disks", indeed), you can't have HR act as scribe and relay the answer to you, because they'll get it wrong, and the interesting bit is the *conversation*, not the canned single-shot answer.
Definitely. I like the describe difference between UDP/TCP question. Another fave of mine is "Give me a list of various acronyms and its associated port" and give them HTTP/80 as an example. Many interviews end shortly after this one.
That's my motivation for asking a question as inane as "What does TCP stand for?" -- it has an overwhelmingly obvious answer that can be verified in a second or two by someone who really doesn't know anything about what they're asking. Give a candidate 10 of those sorts of questions over the phone from an HR drone, if they score 8-or-better (for instance) they pass and you get to see their resume. That is, of course, assuming your organisation is so screwed up that they won't let you at candidates directly (which is still my preferred option -- leave HR to do the paperwork).
+1