I blew an interview at Sprint once. The question was “Do you prefer to work by yourself or part of a team?”. I said I didnt care and kept giving my reasons for each but they kept hammering me and I answered by myself.
So I didnt get the job because they said they only wanted people who would work in a team.
At KCPL they will ask one question to techs and field workers over the phone - “What is ground?”.
My best job didn’t require a job interview (for me, others were interviewed). I just took a skills test, then the recruiter hired me after asking a couple questions over the phone.
The jerks of the world have a knack for distributing themselves somewhat evenly among companies. There’s one in every crowd, as they say.
I vote waste of time. The person with the connections, or the nicest set of tits get hired. Fuck your goddamn college degree.
There are no “correct” answers to a lot of the questions, just good answers and bad answers.
One of my favorite questions for QA testers is about what they would do if development gets the software to them a few days before we’re supposed to release, but they have a week’s worth of testing to do. Good answers are along the lines of prioritization of test cases, working extra hours, enlisting extra help from other areas of the company, etc. A bad answer would be, “Start at the top of the test list and get as much done as I can. It’s not my fault that the code came in late.” That’s not technically “incorrect” and is a valid point, but I would probably not want to hire that person.
We try to leave the questions as open ended as possible so we can get a sense of how the person thinks and behaves in a professional environment. Our development manager likes to ask questions where “I would have to Google that,” is a perfectly acceptable answer.
The technical questions tend to have definitively “correct” answers.
As for hiring jerks, sometimes - despite an interviewers best efforts - the jerk can suppress their jerkiness for the hour or so of an interview and they get hired.
At our company, the interview is just a formality. Generally the owner will call me and say: “This guy put in an application. What is his story?”
Locally, my field is rather small. There are maybe fifty people, and seven companies that do the work. Many guys are prone to move from one company to another, but the techs are mostly a known quantity. We all know what to expect when these guys try to switch jobs, and it is pretty easy to avoid hiring the lazy, the dishonest, the drunks and the plain batshit insane.
There is one company with an enormous turnover rate, mainly because management there is dishonest and treats their technicians like slaves. Slowly but surely, the guys no one else wants to hire are ending up there…
I work in IT. Off the top of my head, I can think of two fantastic reasons that interviews aren’t a waste of time for everyone.
People lie on their resumes. We get candidates here ALL THE TIME where their resume says they’re an expert in X, but when you ask them a basic question about X in the interview they have no idea what you are talking about.
I give great interview. If I get an interview I get the job, so the system works for me. 
One thing that doesn’t come across in a resume is how passionate they are about their field. I’m in computer programming and it can be quite evident in person the difference between someone who loves to write code and someone who is doing it because it’s a job. This is often very noticeable with college graduates. Their resumes often look very similar, and on paper they would all seem to be good fits. But when you ask them technical questions about projects they’ve written, it’s clear that to some people it was just generic classwork to complete to get the grade. Other people will light up when describing what they wrote.
It’s not that one is necessarily better than the other. For someone who is accomplished but not necessarily passionate, they might be a good fit in a test or build group which doesn’t require a lot of brilliant problem solving. And likewise, the passionate person might not be a good fit for a testing position because they might find it boring. The interview gives you the chance to see where they fit with both their skills and personality.
I’d think it would still be useful for the other people on the team. And the interviewee. I’d want to know what I was getting into.
We don’t make the interns we give offers to go through interviews, though. They know what they are getting into.
Sounds like a job you were lucky you didn’t get.
What should you do? A or B?
Well, here are the advantages of A, here are the ones for B.
Choose dammit!
B.
Wrong!
However team is almost always the right answer to stupid questions like that. You can do it the right way when you get the job.
I have been called to interviews where the hiring manager was just filling up the checkboxes: the Procedure called for at least three interviews, so the manager was holding three interviews even though they already knew who they wanted to hire.
It was a waste of time for all parties, not just me. The company was paying for that hiring manager to spend time looking for candidates, interviewing… when that searching and interviewing was going to lead to nothing productive. I much prefer the approach of a company to which I was sent by the Employment Office who, when I called them, said “oh damn, the truth is, we already have the person… uh, I know you’ll need the letter from EO stamped, can you bring it and we’ll stamp it and invite you to a cuppa?”
That doesn’t mean interviews are a waste of time, though: I know quite a few people who look perfect on paper because for years they’ve been able to hold onto each job for just long enough that it looks good on paper. They don’t know their faces from their asses, though, and anybody who knows the subjects on which they are supposed to be “experts” will be able to tell.
My current client has hired several people for my team in the time I’ve been with them, and I’ve been part of six interviews for candidates (aside from the one that got me the job): one was asking for London daily rates for an in-house salaried position in Yorkshire (the ad already listed the monthly salary offered and that it was in-house; he said he’d figured it was worth a try), another had claimed knowledge of two SAP modules he’d heard about but evidently never worked with. On paper, both looked good.
In Spain it isn’t only CS but just any major, and not only the Arturitos (“Arties”). The collective nickname is bollicaos, after an industrial pastry that looks good but tastes like cardboard and might have less nutritional value than cardboard.
Gawd - I LOVE IT.
Too bad “Twinkie” is already (over)used in the US - but I’ll leave it to the current gen to spread out the concept.
For really scary? Pacific Bell (the real-life home of Dilbert) wanted to get their IT department DOWN TO 30% Andersen Children
Or, what if an interview is just a sneaky way for a company to look into what the available labor pool is like for a specific job or to find out what salary their competition is paying?
I even interviewed at one place where, well I though it was odd, they had me come in early like about 7:30. I was told to sit in one place and fill out a form. Well I noticed this is across from the elevator all the employees used when they came in to work so I wondered if it was just a way to scare their employees by saying “look, someone else wants a job here, maybe they will get yours!”.
Some of you have mentioned getting hired without doing an interview, or only interviewing over the phone. Is there a way that I can make that happen?
There are lots of salary surveys available, which would be a lot more accurate than one or two samples whose salaries might be below median - otherwise they wouldn’t be as interested in interviewing. But this is yet another good reason to not share your salary until there is firm discussion of an offer. Certainly not at the beginning of the process.
Getting hired without an interview typically happens when someone at the hiring company already knows you very well and is high enough in the company to just bring you on immediately. Unfortunately, that is pretty rare. Many companies use phone interviews, but they are typically just a pre-screening process to see if they want to bring you in for a full interview.
Are there jobs out there that don’t require an interview at all? If so, I would think they would be menial jobs where the employer is just looking for a random person to do some basic task and doesn’t really care if works out in the long run.
Not being good at interviews or trying to avoid them altogether is going to seriously impact your ability to get hired and the quality of jobs you’ll have access to. You may want to improve your interviewing skills. It’s a skill you can learn just like any other. Find some job placement services in your area–some will even be free. They will help with creating your resume and will give advice on how to ace the interview.
That’s a mature attitude in software. I would expect decent developers to know by heart the difference between a value parameter and a reference parameter or (for most) to name three differences between C++ and Java. Nobody actually memorizes API documentation. If I need to know how to get the name of the current web server in an ASP.NET 4.0 application, I will look it up.
That will depend a lot on the sector, location and company. If every candidate is distant enough that a personal interview would mean missing days in their existing job, then personal interviews will most likely not be required. If it is expected that most candidates will be local enough that even if they have a job they can attend an interview, it’s more likely that one will be required.
During a recent interview:
“Tell me about categories” (in objective c)
“They are the coolest thing ever. I know I said autorelease was and then blocks, but these are better. They are similar to subclasses, but they don’t change the class signature and they allow you to add methods to any instance of the class, even ones you didn’t create”
“Say you wanted to extend UIColor…”
“I’d use that snippet on stack overflow we’ve all been using for the last 5 years”
In the one before that (same company, different interview), I was writing code on a computer in the interview. I admitted to the interviewer that I couldn’t remember the syntax for blocks. He looked at me and said, completely deadpan:
I got the job, so I guess looking it up was acceptable.
What you’re really trying to do is find out if they will understand what they googled. That’s a bit harder to do than quizzing them on APIs.
(Oh, to answer the question, yes, interviews are useful. And very difficult to do well.)
My Boss asked me a few questions and told me to come in on Monday. I was amazed.
About a month later, he asked me to help him make a display, and started asking me questions while we were doing it. About a half hour into it, I realized that was the real interview. In short, he first saw if I had the skills to do the job, them found out about me.
I bet he saves a lot of time and patience with that system.