What is your greatest weakness? The definitive list of the many kinds of interviewer you will meet in Hell
- Reference: 1627288208
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2021/07/26/types_of_interviewer_feature/
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The Status Manager
A common defect is to confuse the "status" of a company with the quality of the person you are interviewing. I once hired a manager from Fujitsu – no don't laugh, he was great. My view was that if you can get stuff done there, you are something special and, more cynically, that no one was going to try and poach someone with the F-word on their CV.
That cuts both ways, however. At a highly prestigious consultancy, they needed a decent programmer (god how they needed one), so I suggested my ex-boss, who had gone freelance. The snide little droids were still giggling when they came out: he'd done a stint doing highly technical stuff at Lewisham Waste Management, a world away from their statement offices near Charing Cross.
Despite all of them combined having less understanding than a SOAS graduate, I as a freelancer wasn't allowed to interview people, so they didn't hire him. Moreover, the project went so badly downhill after I left that I had to use my full skillset to avoid anyone working out I'd ever been there from my CV.
[3]
"You don’t mind if we record this, do you?"
The Eight Headed Manager
One of the most damaging attitudes companies can have is that if you really want to work for them then you will put up with anything for the privilege. This takes many forms – from having eight (yes, really) interviews, to being left for an hour in reception because the manager is "too busy" even to send an apology, let alone tell you how long it will be, to being belittled.
They will schedule meetings at times they find convenient with no acknowledgement that you have a job to do. And of course HR will have a rule that, despite the havoc wrought by COVID, there must be no "gaps" on your CV – even if the gap is caused by them taking six weeks to generate an actual offer letter after verbally offering the job.
The most glaring contempt an employer can show a prospective hire is having a first interview with an HR or even a recruitment process outsourcer (RPO), stating clearly that you are just a "Resource" – an increment to a digit in a spreadsheet. Odds are that, like me, you will find that as the least bad option in your life at some point. How great do you think your commitment to the firm might be?
[4]
"I'm only going to ask you this one last time. Yes, then you can bring in Pam, Richard, thank you. No you can't have a glass of water. Is this your oregano? Is it ethically sourced?"
The multi-interview death marches have become more common since we started doing them on Zoom. Partly because they are easier to schedule, but also managers have become wary of too little "visible productivity" and discovered "helping" the interview process as a way of making sure they aren't forgotten. And of course as it gets harder to fire someone who doesn't fit, you rationally become more risk-averse.
The Business Manager
A decade ago a huge percentage of IT pros wanted to work for banks. It was a one-way love affair, with managers openly despising the geeks, referring to them as "not part of the business" and hiring failed traders, accountants and MBAs to run IT groups – but at least the money was good.
Today, of course, the whole finance sector finds that Data Scientists, Security Pros, and Artificial Intelligencers won't even apply. They focus wholly on "business" questions, even when the only knowledge of banking (or retail or logistics) you really need is grasping that having more money is better. They judge you on their guess at the price of your suit and even your watch (for our younger readers, in the last century people would spend thousands on a clockwork toy on their wrist if one a bit like it was worn by a golfer on TV).
[5]Former ad exec sticks Steve Jobs' 1973 job application in a scanner for physical-versus-digital NFT auction
[6]You're not imagining it. Amazon and AWS want to hire all your friends, enemies, and everyone in between
[7]Quick thinking and an explanation for everything – key CTO qualities
[8]The common factor in all your failed job applications: Your CV
The Amateur
Just because you are paid to do something, doesn't make you a professional. It requires experience, training and pride in quality. I did some of this research stuff like a proper journalist and found that many interviewers not only had literally no training, but the average tech manager has had more formal training in cookery – since a trip to [9]Leith's to learn knife skills is a common birthday present when you have no idea what to buy someone. The little training they've had was arranged by HR who, as it was explained to me by the head HR of a huge firm, have the job of "protecting management from staff". So that training almost wholly involved avoiding getting sued for discrimination – which is good, but does nothing for choosing the best and avoiding the worst.
As this article is aimed at tech managers whose work presumably needs a proper grasp of quality control methodologies, I would ask if you can think of even one QA technique used in your recruitment process?
[10]
How about the simple one of putting a known good – or indeed bad – candidate through it? Or tracking decision makers and processes against the performance of the people they output? Even HR does better than you, tracking the difference in diversity between who you interview and who you hire. Oh you didn't know that? Do you wonder perhaps if this information will be used for or against you?
The Winner
Some interviewers get off on beating the poor sucker across the desk, often with trick questions. The first time it happened to me I was asked to pick the three most important characteristics out of seven. I guessed, and not only was I wrong, but with a manic glee in his eye the interviewer exclaimed that all of them were.
A variant on this is the manager who thinks doing a stupid thing more vigorously somehow makes it good. So they ask really hard questions, and are so very pleased with themselves when they ask about an algorithm whose name you can't spell, let alone know by heart or a language construct of such obscurity that only [11]Peter Landin knew what it was for. Well done: Manager 1, Candidate 0.
[12]
[13]
The signal-to-noise ratio of this is horrible. Once you get past the skills necessary to do the job well, you're gambling that you are separating smart people from ones lucky enough to have found it on the same web site you use because you're also too lazy and not smart enough to make them up yourself.
In the real world, you are building a team to get things done – or at least stop things getting worse. That means complementary skills and that means you have to compromise getting the best, in order to make sure you cover all the holes. Two excellent Python devs do not an IoT expert make.
The recruitment process outsourcer (RPO)
Some firms can't even be bothered to interview you, delegating it to someone with a degree in Grievance Studies who actively hates tech professionals. Since they have been on two weeks of Tech Bootcamp, they decide (as one did) to argue over whether the content of a PhD CompSci thesis from Imperial meant what it said. After a while this has the desired result of making a candidate give up and go elsewhere so they could put in someone from their own recruitment arm.
The Cheap SQL Interviewer
Long before my pimping days, I went for a job doing financial calculations in C++, so they asked me deep questions about SQL. It turned out that they wanted me because they had no-one like me, and worked on the principle that if my SQL was what I said, then the rest was likely true.
That sadly common trick has a high noise-to-signal ratio. They should have hired a contractor for a fraction of the cost of what someone costs over the years they do a good or bad job. But that costs money – and recruitment is all about short-term cost saving. And anyway, HR has a no-contractor policy, which of course is different when it comes to the temps they hire when their workload seems too much.
The Ethicist
Especially in banking we now have to endure the questions about Ethics which, to paraphrase Groucho Marx, is something you need to learn how to fake. To check whether someone not only has a strong moral compass, but that it aligns with yours (as well as your regulator) is hard. I'd want a couple of hours to even guess. They allocate three minutes, during which an RPO will ask you to describe a situation where you faced an ethical conflict. You intone something about how you understood why an action was attractive but you felt uneasy and sought the guidance of a appropriate senior person. I guess if you can't bear to bring yourself to say that, then we should worry – otherwise it's just boilerplate backside covering.
The Robot
I am not a fan of the many online tests. For IT pros, they mostly test knowledge – and the superior engineer isn't just someone who knows things, however important that is. They need to have good judgement in choosing a given construct, pattern or approach. You can learn how to do something a lot more easily than you can determine whether it's the right choice. It's also far from unknown for over-enthusiastic candidates to pay for a few attempts at the online test themselves, and thus do much better than they should. But realistically they are cheap and objective, not caring about gender, race or anything else. In fact if by some chance you wanted a better quality process you would use them as comparison. But you don't, do you ?
There are plenty of fish in the sea
So why does this matter, if there are so many people out there that you always fill your slots?
Defective interviews separate those who will put up with it because they don't have many other options, from those who do. Do you really want to hire the first kind? We both know that the spread in any sample of IT pros' ability is so large, and just one of them under or over-performing can mean that you become the one having to endure horrible interviews with few other options. ®
Get our [14]Tech Resources
[1] https://www.theregister.com/2021/06/02/cv_improvement_job_search/
[2] https://www.theregister.com/2021/06/14/covid_careers/
[3] https://regmedia.co.uk/2021/07/22/shutterstock_record.jpg
[4] https://regmedia.co.uk/2021/07/22/shutterstock_interrogation.jpg
[5] https://www.theregister.com/2021/07/21/steve_jobs_application_nft_auction/
[6] https://www.theregister.com/2021/07/21/amazon_aws_recruitment/
[7] https://www.theregister.com/2020/10/19/who_me/
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2021/06/02/cv_improvement_job_search/
[9] https://www.leiths.com/professional-courses/chef-skills-daytime-course?gclid=CjwKCAjwruSHBhAtEiwA_qCppuHoDY8WbliPhI-JXD7spVM0a2tNF1ANfovZU9-PviFlLZkd80le1hoCUt4QAvD_BwE
[10] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offbeat/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2YP6Hw4S4iJ2ZVLZAlfDK-wAAANQ&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[11] https://history-computer.com/inventions/landins-computing-machine/
[12] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offbeat/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44YP6Hw4S4iJ2ZVLZAlfDK-wAAANQ&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[13] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offbeat/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33YP6Hw4S4iJ2ZVLZAlfDK-wAAANQ&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[14] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Dignity
One of the most damaging attitudes companies can have is that if you really want to work for them then you will put up with anything for the privilege.
Something I will never understand. Why would you want to put up with anything just to help someone make their dream for a pittance? Most of big and "glamorous" corporations avoid taxes, pay pennies and exploit their workers.
Re: Dignity
I once interviewed for a lowly tech position at a financial company, and they made me go to Central London 5 times in total, getting through technical tests, interviews with various engineers, managers, and HR types, and on the last one spent two hours talking absolute nonsense about how great they were.
This was after 3 months of being out of work, so I put up with it, because I didn't feel like I had any other choice.
I had an interview for another company that afternoon. It lasted 45 minutes, and they called to offer me the job before I'd even got home...
Re: Dignity
and on the last one spent two hours talking absolute nonsense about how great they were.
It's good to say: Is this an MLM presentation or am I tripping? What did you add to my coffee! HELP!
It's a two-way street
While some company worker-ant is interviewing a candidate, that candidate is also assessing them. And by extension, the organisation that thought it would be smart to have that individual project an image of the company. One that is almost entirely superfluous, to people who neither know nor care about its products, ethics, "work-life balance" or anything else except the number on the offer letter, if their manager is going to be a complete 'hole (or just a partial one), whether they will gain any marketable skills and whether the coffee is any good.
That Meme
"What do you see as your greatest weakness?"
'Honesty.'
"I don't really see that honesty is a weakness."
'I don't give a fuck what you think.'
Interesting previous interviews
One time (many, many years ago) I was interviewed for a C++ programming job. At the start of the interview process they basically gave me a test to do, with 45 minutes to finish - the test basically covered a lot of edge cases that trip those who cannot breath an program at the same time. Having been working intensively with C++ for at least the previous 8 years, I finished the test an about 20 minutes. The company concerned structured the rest of the interview as a discussion of the mistakes you made in the test ("why did you think X occurs in this situation"), which proved a problem since I was the first person they had ever interviewed who got 100% on the test. They basically floundered around the rest of the interview; I did not take up the job offer that subsequently came through.
Nearly 2 years ago I started the interview process with another company. I pulled out when one of their directors failed to attend my 5th interview (all done using Zoom because of the pandemic), and the HR droid decided to step in and asked the same questions they had asked for my 3rd interview the previous month. Not surprisingly the company appears to have started to collapse a few months after I refused to continue the interview farce.
Oh yeah…
Two particularly memorable interviews this brings back to me.
One about a decade ago, the company had me come over from Scandinavia to the UK for an interview where they told me the job was on hold and therefore they couldn’t pay any of my expenses after all as the job didn’t exist, but they wanted to interview me anyway to see what they would have potentially got and put it in a filing cabinet. No doubt with signs saying “beware of the leopard”.
Another just recently, where after 3 Zoom interviews and 1 physical interview, I saw what a mess things were by the government openly badmouthing the company’s whole contract and threatening the whole multi billion dollar contract with termination that I decided to say nah to a 5th interview, no matter how fun and interesting it sounded.
Re: Oh yeah…
?
They got you to pay to travel across the North Sea to be told you didn't have a job?
I hope you sued them or at least sent a very snotty letter to their board level management, to 'The Times' about that.
I've had some horrible interviews
I've faced the interviewers who were determined to prove that they knew more than you, at whatever the cost.
I also once drove about 4 hours for an interview, which was held in a boardroom. The two jokers doing the interviewing sat opposite me but at each corner of the huge boardroom table - so big in fact that if I was facing one of them to talk, the other wasn't in my direct eyeline.
They then proceeded to argue between themselves whilst occasionally snapping a bad tempered question my way. I stood up part way through, told them I didn't know what the hell game they were playing and thanked them for wasting my time and walked out. The agency called me to say they'd offered me the role. I told them not in a million years, and exactly why.
Another one that stuck in my mind was the guy who would ask a question then not give me time to think about the answer - would just go "No? Ok moving on" before I had to say hang on fella - I like to think before I speak, how about giving me the courtesy of letting me? Didn't get that one.
Oh and one I had that went extremely well. Was the personable kind of interview that had no technical content. The manager shook my hand and said "You'll be a great addition to our team". The agency called me whilst I was still in the car park to say the manager didn't think I was technical enough... I actually asked him to call him back and check that he hadn't confused his candidates. I explained what he'd said and that there had, in fact, been literally zero technical questions in the interview.
He called me back a few minutes later to say yeah.. he is adamant it's you he's thinking of. Oh well.
I always use the interview process to assess the company and the people I'll be working with/for and I'm not afraid to say "nah". You spend a long time at work. It's important to be happy there.
I hold no brief for SOAS graduates, but …
Some of [1]this lot surely have some understanding of something.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_School_of_Oriental_and_African_Studies_people
The Faddist
One type of interviewer unaccountably not mentioned is the incompetent faddist. This is when there is a new 'fad' or 'buzzword' for assessing someone's general competence by some COMPLETELY UNRELATED character trait.
So, for example, the rumour is that IBM had a fad where they'd take the candidate to lunch, and if the person put salt on their food before tasting it, they didn't get hired. In another case the two interviewers had arranged the chairs so that the interviewees chair was pointed slightly away from the iteriezwers. If the candidate didn't mover the chair to face them, they were rejected.
One interview I had there were two interviewers, who sat on different sides of the table, with me on another side. Apart from simple questions like "would like a cup of coffee?" and "Did you sign I at reception?" one of them interrupted the answer to every question the other asked and vice versa. The only time they did not interrupt was when I gave my '5 minute presentation' on "Identity"*. These two were an awful double act. After about an hour I left knowing that whatever happened I would not be working for them, and went to the National Gallery to recover. Could I really be that bad at my job? I'd done security reviews of many government departments and agencies, I'd successfully advised on security for secure IT systems and been complemented by the government accreditors on several occasions. No, the interviewers were crap, but oh they clearly thought they were 'the bees knees'. I did even consider writing to their manager and complaining but then I thought "why help the opposition?"**
*In InfoSec that was the standard topic for a presentation by the candidate for years. I always started with Newton's anonymous answer to a problem of Daniel Bernoulli for which he received a polite thanks. When asking Daniel how he knew it was him, Newton got the reply "You recognise the lion by the stroke of his paw". I never got hired, but that's another story.
**If you did this, consider the purpose of an interview - it is to determine whether the candidate's CV is accurate, and find out what they are good at, and what they are not so good at. If you interrupt every answer they give, you are interviewing them for a press officer position facing a hostile room of journalists, not a technical IT job, you wazzocks.***
*** Yes, I'm STILL pissed off at you. I took a day's leave to attend that interview and you didn't even have the courtesy to be polite.
What have I been missing?
A caveat to start with: not IT - my career started in engineering and evolved into QHSE consultancy and auditing (although all involved significant involvement in the application of acquired ICT skills).
I recall three interviews where I was being interviewed as part of a paring process (i.e. reduce the short leat to the number of vacancies). They were back in 1974 when I was about to graduate with my BSc and seeking my first job. One was with the MoD (a formal interview panel, limited allowable expenses - 2nd class rail and bus, but no taxi nor meals), one with a large engineering group (that involved team exercises over two days), and one with an engineering company with an enviable reputation (where i was met by my prospective manager, followed by an "informal" discussion with members of the department's management team). I turned down offers from the first two and accepted the third; it was the company I really wanted to work for and they even offered the best starting salary (which I treated as a bonus). I moved on after a few years but their enviable reputation was well deserved.
Since then, until retirement, all interviews (bar one) were by organisations who had approached me, and interviews were relatively relaxed. The "bar one" was an exploratory application I'd made, to investigate what they were offering, in case it was as good as it seemed to outsiders. The interview demonstrated several of the failings in the article: I had applied for a post as a contractor (per their vacancy advertisement), they started by thanking me for my staff application; they asked questions on situations that should never occur (and I told them so); the terms they offered were below my current earnings, and also required me to do some unpaid work for them (and at my expense) as a probationary period. Despite telling them what I thought, they still made their offer - that I happily turned down. Ironically, I later picked up a contract that involved auditing them on behalf of prospective customers - I don't hold grudges (though I I often take prior experience into account)!
I must have been lucky in being able to choose where I worked.
I've had two interviews that stick in my mind.
The first was for a contracting firm, where they told me up front there would be 2 telephone interviews (I was living in a different country at the time and this was before the days of video conferencing) followed by an in person interview if the other 2 went well. No Problem, they were up front about it. The first Telephone interview would be with my would-be manager, the second with HR and a company Executive (to test company fit i guess). I had the first telephone interview and it was great, manager and I got on swimmingly.
The next day I got a call to say I had the job, they'd be sending me the contract in the post today, and could I please start next week. And yes I did take the job, moved country and was in place the week later as requested only to find out they werent ready for me (they did pay me for that time even though they couldnt actually get me to start work, but thats a whole other story...
The second was actually not a job interview, but a firm that would be using our contracting firm, wanted to interview the engineers that would actually be doing the work to check that they actually knew their stuff (smart, no?). So a dozen of us engineers are sitting around a table facing a handful of their staff, and they started going around the table, really grilling people. It got to me, the lead guy asked me one question with an extremely smug look on his face which he must have thought was a really hard, killer of a question, but which happened to be something I'd been working on not more than a week before. 30 seconds into my detailed explanation of the answer and with a shocked look on his face, he simply cut me off with a "You're fine. Next!" and moved on.
If you ask a question of someone in an interview, you really should not be shocked when they know the answer. Thankfully, I never needed to work with any of the people aksing the questions and the engineers at the firm where top drawer. So all good! :)
Given that the employer holds almost all the cards in an employment relationship, the most important part of the interview process is for the candidate to decide whether or not they've be happy working for that employer.
The employer needs to make sure the candidate is competent for the job, and, hopefully, whether they'd fit in with their potential colleagues. Since every job is different, an ability to think, learn, and adapt is often more important than some particular technical ability or experience on their CV.
As the article says, the employer needs to avoid anyone who is applying solely because they're desperate for a job.
A good interview should be a pleasurable experience for everyone involved. Whatever the outcome.
Missing type
The clueless idiot
I always used the tea and coffee facilities as the litmus test for any workplace; if it turns blue then they value their workforce as human beings, if it turns red then we are just numbers on the balance sheet.
One opening, the interviewer turned up at reception ten minutes late with a coffee in hand. Did not offer me one but ushered me straight in to the interview room. Colleague waiting there with hers did not blink. Time for the first question. As far as I was concerned, the interview was over before it had begun.
Best interview questions I have been asked, and later asked:
“What is systemd?”
and
“How do you format your code?”
Neither of these were asked to elicit a “correct” answers, but to act as an asshole trigger: someone who holds such strong opinions about either of these things that they’d let loose at an interview is not someone who will be a net benefit to any development team.
Personally, I have never been asked to whiteboard a qsort algorithm or other sorts of dick-wavery, but a former employer did ask interviewees to write a trivial program (<10 lines of C) from a three-line spec in any language of their choice. You would be amazed how many people with “programmer” in their CV cannot form a simple loop and a conditional… (nobody ever offered to use a functional language)
My greatest weakness...
...is my need to restrain my Fist Of Death from delivering a much needed smash to pound the stupid out of buzzword bingo spewing bullshit artists that think they know enough to tell me how to do my job. If you can stand there & spout bollocks to tell me how to improve the quality of my work then you can bloody well do the job yourself. Now go away before my ability to restrain myself vanishes like your competence.