I'm very confused why Tim would take a job after an interview like that!

I'm guessing he wasn't fond of waking up at 5am on a December morning to go and pour concrete.

He was also unable to do a decent wolf whistle!

I'm very confused why Tim would take a job after an interview like that!

If someone has the guts to say I am correct after such a disagreement, I can work for him.

> If someone has the guts to say I am correct after such a disagreement, I can work for him.

It doesn't actually say the CTO admitted fault, let alone apologised for it

It doesn't actually say the CTO admitted fault, let alone apologised for it

The admittance is implied in that he was offered a position above what he applied for. And there is no need to apologize for a heated discussion as long as it remained civilized.

Tim didn't - it was about Colin. But, yes, one has to wonder why he took the job - perhaps out of curiosity or desperation. After all, it got him off the building site.

> He soon learned that the CTO [...] had assumed nobody would touch his code.

He can't have been a very good CTO if he assumed rather than investigated ...

I'm not sure. CTO is a manglement position so he seems ideally fitted for it.

Not long after "interviewing" Colin, the CTO checked the code – and found changes. Lots of changes. Bad changes that were the reason for the server's many problems.

Which Colin then got on with fixing.

You mean he implemented the postfixes

He was made an eximple of...

I’m very pleased to see that nobody has mentioned line noise, sorry, sendmail, in this subthread yet…

Or a certain other not-internet-standard mail server that I won’t sully this comment with by mentioning its name…

What's wrong with Sendmail? Sure, it has a rather steep learning curve ... but I only had to learn it once, and it's been working just fine for me these last 40 years or so.

> Or a certain other not-internet-standard mail server that I won’t sully this comment with by mentioning its name…

Let's not sully the Internet with an Exchange discussing its poor Outlook...

I contractor friend of mine once went for an "interview" for a new contract that was supposed to be outside the scope of IR35.

The technical discussions went very well. The project was interesting, with some aspects that would require some "real work" to get a decent solution in place.

Likewise, the client was very happy with the way he presented himself and he clearly demonstrated that his team would be able to deliver.

Which is when things went down hill:

Client: "Thanks for coming in. We are happy to place the contract with you. We just need to invite HR in to have a word with you before we can formalise things".

Contractor: "Oh. Ok, I guess!"

HR: "So, I want you to pretend you are a bap in the baker's shop. Tell me why I should buy you"?

The contractor turns to the project guys and says "Thank you gentlemen, I now know everything I need to about this organisation. Good day".

Has anyone been able to find out exactly what value HR add to a company.

They add great value when the time comes to lay people off.

HR exists to protect the company from its employees.

The clues in the name , they are there to reduce a person to a "resource"

Understandable. He was a contractor, not easy to pretend to be a bap when you know you're an eclair.

"HR: "So, I want you to pretend you are a bap in the baker's shop. Tell me why I should buy you"?"

Me: Actually, I'm the baker, and I'm not for sale.

Interviewed at a school for an IT position once. Actually two similar roles at the same school, and I was qualified for both. They were interviewing on different days for each, so I got given an interview for both roles on different days.

As I was driving to the weeks-before-booked appointment, and it was a 30-minute drive away, they sent an *email* to say that the interview had moved to another venue on the other side of town. Just sheer chance meant I had stopped for fuel and checked my email.

When I turned up, the front of the school looked like a tip.

Was pointed to reception (there were no signs!) by a random staff member.

Ending up sitting on a broken, torn, dirty sofa in a "reception" area which was an area of grubby, torn-up carpet in the corner of a corridor.

Was left waiting there 20 minutes without any sign, long after the interview should have started.

Was eventually collected by someone and led - no exaggeration - THROUGH an in-use staff toilet room. It was the only way to access the main IT office.

"Office" was a cupboard just big enough for 3 people to stand in it. If two of you ducked under horrendous cupboards above your head that were a literal hazard. It was clearly a former cup-washing kitchen type room, because it wasn't big enough for any practical purpose whatsoever. Which was unfortunate because there were 3 of us, me, the guy who'd collected me (who was a teacher) and the IT manager.

I had to sit hunched the whole time because the chair for the interviewee was under a cupboard so standing up meant braining yourself.

Cue an interrogation about... the school. Not once was IT mentioned, but they were disappointed that I hadn't remembered the EXACT pupil numbers on their website (but I was not only in the ballpark but I had merely rounded up to the nearest ten). I get "knowing your customer" and checking the website before interview, but memorising random facts like establishment date and pupil number seemed to be the only thing they were interested in. This went on for a LONG time, and obviously some of it I literally hadn't memorised, some of it they weren't happy unless the number was absolutely exact, and none of it was about IT.

In some prestigious school, I might expect *some* of that, and in fact had worked in many such places hence why I had checked the website and had answers for all the relevant stuff, even if they didn't like them. But this was a run-down state school that looked like it would be condemned any minute. And if it was about child protection policies, or generally working in the school, fine, I'm used to those questions. But this was literally about "what year was this school established", "who was the first headmaster" (hint: absolutely nobody you would ever remember), etc.

At one point got asked a inane "management"-type question that wasn't even relevant to any school role I'd ever had in my life. "I'm sorry, but can I just check, this is the interview for the IT position, right?". They absolutely hated that and tried to terminate the interview there and then. I was already halfway there myself, but out of politeness, and with the help of the teacher guy, we pulled it back to common sense for a second. Then they continued on exactly the same lines. Eventually the manager and I just looked at each other and said "This isn't going to work". We terminated the interview there, not an IT question asked.

We didn't even bother to shake hands. As I was led out, the teacher apologised profusely, and I told them politely that if they didn't want to hire, they shouldn't waste people's time. The guy was clearly trying to either protect his job from people with better experience, or was so antisocial that he literally didn't want anyone to take the role at all. Even if he was trying to "warn" people off the job, there are a million better ways to do that, but that's absolutely NOT what he was trying to do. He'd taken exception to me before I'd even walked through the door... or through the staff toilet, and yet we'd never actually spoke and basic interview / hiring etiquette on my part meant that he had absolutely no reason not to like me at that point.

Nobody, nor myself, mentioned or bothered about the second interview for the other (similar but different) role.

As an IT manager for private schools now, I use that as a lesson when hiring on what NOT to do to any candidate no matter how ill-fitting you think they are.

Other ones I've had included a "technical test" where the question was "How would *you* retrieve all the DNS servers configured on a client machine?". IPCONFIG. "Wrong!". Oh, right, you mean "ipconfig /all" then. "Wrong!". No, honestly, I would. It lists them all. In plain text, in a copyable format, and shows if you have more than two, and shows all interface and their configured DNS. Guy absolutely outright insisted that it didn't and that I was wrong. As this was only a year or so after the above interview, I was already in the "Okay, this isn't going to work" phase, so I battled on and insisted that it does. I had a keyboard thrown at me... "Go on then, show me! You're wrong". So I ran ipconfig /all, scrolled up and there were all the DNS servers listed for each interface in a plain-text copyable format. I even copied it to prove that.

He didn't even have the decency to look humbled. He got very stroppy, told me that it was "the wrong way" and that the only way to do it was through the GUI (that was never part of the question, and the question was how would *I* do it!) - and I pointed out that that took many clicks, was increasingly being hidden away on modern Windows, the classic interface only showed two DNS servers until you went to another tab, and that you had to do it for each and every interface separately. He just stuck with his "Wrong!" attitude. I didn't bother wasting their time from then on.

Reminds me of a previous job interview for an IT support role - back in the days of PCs being beige boxes. Took place in the staff canteen "because the meeting room was being decorated". Interview was in the middle of the day, so lots of staff going in and out eating their lunch.

One of the questions was "PC does not power up, no beeps etc., what's the first thing you would check?" I said power supply, try a known good unit. Interviewer told me I was wrong. I pointed out that he'd asked me what I would do, and I'd answered in that way - while he might try something else, *I* would do this. He still insisted I was wrong, voices were raised and he said it would be a RAM issue (with no BIOS beeps?!) - funnily enough, I didn't get the job...

I'd check the power cord first, followed by checking if there was power at the socket, followed by the power supply itself.

Have VOM, will travel.

I recall someone telling me about an exam test for Excel where it was a mockup interface of Excel and asked you to perform various tasks[1]. One of them was "copy cell A2 to cell B5" or whatever and the only way which worked was to use "Edit/Copy -> Edit->Paste" via the menus so everyone who knew the keyboard shortcuts would fail that part of the test. There are at least 4 methods to copy cells I can recall off the top of my head and there are probably more which will work equally well, so having it only support one was pretty short sighted.

Any time I've been asking the technical questions, I tend to be fairly open to whatever they'll come back with. There's usually 5 different ways to start dealing with a problem, all of which are valid. I'm generally looking for an idea of their approach than specifics (which are mostly found via Google, let's be honest).

[1] this was some time ago when experience in MS Office wasn't a given.

I remember such tests, even the cursor keys were disabled! You were expected to even *navigate* via the mouse.

down down right ctrl-c right right ctrl-v, looks up, eh? nothing's happened. down down downdowndowndowndown Miss! Miss! My keyboard's broken!

I used to work in an actuarial department, and they got fed up of being unable to tell what people meant by "good excel skills". Some people thought that being able to copy down a sumif was 'good', some people had got the hang of Index(match()) but 'struggled with nested IF statements after six layers' and so rated themselves as "okay". Genuinely, most applicants had no objective sense of how good they were with Excel, and that made it surprisingly hard to get the right people into the excel dev team.

They, by combining the knowledge of every excel expert they could find in a room of 140 math grads* employed specifically to predict the future of insurance policies, build a Test. It was like 120ish questions, with worked examples about different features in Excel, who they worked and when you might use them.

Literally no-one got full marks - Excel is too damn big. I'm proud to say I came closer than most, but it was the first time I'd ever heard of 'slicers', and honestly I've still not needed to use those since.

The test turned out to be incredibly useful for dealing with Dunning-Kruger issues in self-reported skills.

*I was not a math grad, but a math/comsci dropout who'd instead spent a decade as on-site support, fixing the Very Clever solutions the actuaries came up with on deadlines.

> peppered Colin with questions about deeply technical hypothetical mail server issues.

I think we have all done technical consultancy masquerading as interviews.

The problem with freely displaying highly specialised knowledge and then being employed on the basis of it, is that as depth of knowledge increases it is often at the cost of its breadth. Your field of expertise gets narrower and narrower.

In addition, once you have solved the particular issue that the job offer was based upon, what further use does your new employer have for you?

While there is some merit in investigating the technical skill of a potential new hire, abusing the job interview for tech support is bad style.

Been there. At the start of my career I was designing state of the art microwave circuits. Then the Thursday Telegraph had a very lucrative job ad for one of our competitors that could have been written for me. I applied and they asked me for an interview. I hadn't been for any job interviews cos I'd been a sponsored student so I didn't really know what to expect. This one went fine until they said something like - now we want to give you a more detailed technical interview. About 6 blokes came in with sketches which constituted a "hypothetical engineering problem" and they wanted me to detail how I'd go about fixing it. I was young, but not stupid. I understood exactly what problems they were having, explained them (the problems, not the solutions) and pointed out how they'd tried to fix them and what had probably happened when the fixes didn't work. I left them in no doubt that I could help them and that that if they wanted the answers they were going to have to employ me. I got a polite "thanks but no thanks" letter.

Insert old joke about starting out knowing nothing about anything and ending up know everything about nothing...

I had an interview kind of like that.

t was supposed to be for a sysadmin type job, but the guy started off going on about a highly specific thing *he* was working on to solve a problem. Not something a day-to-day sysadmin would hit. And I mean looking into packet headers and low-level networking - which, given time, I could work out, but not something being fired at me over a telephone during an interview (especially as the guy said he'd been working the problem for some time).

Very strange interview.

I went for an interview for a PM job. The interviewers were the MD and HR director. Things progressed fairly normally except the MD was a bit annoying and seemed more interested in telling me about his Cambridge PhD rather than finding out about me. It was going OK and we were winding up when the MD stood up, went out and came back with a tray covered with a tea towel He put it on the table and told that when he removed the tea towel I'd have 10 seconds to remember all the objects on the tray. I asked him why. He told me that a good memory was the most important aspect of any job and if I didn't pass the test I wouldn't get it. "Serioulsy?" I asked and looked at the HR director who gave an embarassed shrug. I told him that my cousin had a parrot that could do that and it would literally work for peanuts and I could give him contact details if that's what he wanted. Then I left. When I called the HR director aftewards she was most apologetic, but apparently he did this for all senior candidates and was adamant that people who couldn't remember things were no good.

The MD likely didn't allow senior management to write down anything to avoid an auditable paper trail but still needed them to remember the things that need to be done.

A good 15 or so years ago I drove a good few hours for a face to face interview.

On arriving, it was in the boardroom. The table was the usual sort of thing - very long and narrow.

There was one chair on "my" side, and the two guys each sat at opposite corners which meant that I could actually see both of them so when speaking to/looking at one I was almost turning my back to the other.

From the get-go it was incredibly bad-tempered. One would start to ask me a question for the other to interrupt them. Or I'd be mid answer and they'd interrupt me.

After a short while I'd had enough. I called an end to the interview, saying I had no idea what the hell they were playing at, but thank you for wasting a day of my time but I was done with it.

I hadn't even left the building when the agency called to say they liked me and wanted to offer me the job. I explained in robust terms precisely why I didn't want it.

That technique (two people at opposite ends of a table) is a technique they used to teach in Business Management 101. Another is three or four 'interviewers", each fluent in a different discipline, taking turns rapid-firing unrelated questions at you. I've found that both of them are deployed by companies that are more interested in playing mind-games than actually putting together a smoothly running business, and as such I generally recommend the interviewee fire the company immediately.

I was at an interview once for a similar position I was currently in for a different company but within the same overall group. I was offered a seat and then realised that the two people interviewing me were sitting at right angles and at a distance - in order to answer A, I had to turn in his direction, completely out of sight of B, and then turn to B to answer her, being out of sight of A.

The interview seemed to go okay apart from that and then I was given a hypothetical example. It's so long ago now I can't remember the complete scenario, but it was along the lines of:

It's Friday, 10pm and you're the only one in [part of it was a call centre] the office and someone reports that their computer isn't working. What do you do?

(Thinking: Is this a trick?) Go and help the person.

Okay, good. Now, you get a phone call. What do you do?

I presume I have finished with the user, so answer it.

No, you're still working with the user.

Well, I'd be away from my desk, so they would hopefully leave a message.

You've got the phone with you.

Okay, I'd excuse myself from the user, answer the phone, explain I was busy and promise to call back as soon as I could.

But it's one of the directors.

I would still say the same.

He needs to print a report urgently, but it's not working.

(Thinking: What? An "urgent" report at 10pm on a Friday?!?) I would explain the situation to the director that I was in the middle of helping someone else and would call him back.

But he's a director!

With all due respect, all users are equal and I am already assisting one with an issue - and that user is currently unable to speak to customers and therefore is not generating business for the company.

It's an urgent report that the director can't print.

In that case, can you tell me what the priorities are?

You need to decide them yourself.

In that case, I am helping the user that I have already started helping.

Surprisingly, I didn't get the job - but, obviously, I didn't want it as I'm not into those kind of mind games.

"Surprisingly, I didn't get the job"

Of course you didn't get the job. You missed the correct answer. Tell the director to reboot his PC on the basis that it might fix the problem anyway but if it didn't you might have time to fix the first user's problem or for you phone's battery to suddenly go flat.

Yea glods! Yes, I've had the "the director calls, says it's urgent" thing. It's 10:58, the director can't get the OHP working for the 11am meeting. Well, he should have turned up a bit earlier to check the facilities before the meeting started, OR SCHEDULE AN UNDERLING TO DO THAT FOR HIM. Don't you have any organisational structure?

Dint get that job.

I think you unintentionally omitted the paragraph where the CTO got fired?

I had been creating various lap timing systems and in-car telemetry links for Formula 1. (Early 1990's)

A major worldwide car manufacturer (Dagenham) invited me directly for an interview to do timing systems for them.

I was shown to a large darkened room with a wooden (school type) chair under a spot light.

I immediately moved the chair from under the spotlight when I sat down, but received 3 or 4 people shout that it must go back. I should have left at that point, but the offered wages were 3 times what I was on.

A voice from my left started with standard fairly simple electronics questions - OpAmp configurations for various buffer types - I answered these as I had qualifications in Analog Electronics as well as Software, Digital Electronics and Telecommunications, but thought it strange.

OK, next voice starts, and as my eyes are beginning to adjust to the light and I count 10 people lines up behind desks. As I am counting the questioner berates me for not looking at him when he is speaking! He asks me about different control and feedback loops, but keeps trying to pull me back to analog examples. I just think he must be an old fuddy-duddy, but I throw in analog as well as digit feedback into the questions.

The third person asks about microprocessors, and so I am fine with this.

The fourth person asks about different types of gas sensors, and I have to say that I do not have a detailed knowledge of the ones currently on the market. He huffs and I am onto the firth person.

He really goes off on one shouting and demanding to know which car manufacturers I had been working for, so I listed the F1 teams. This leads to a tirade about how could I work on their engines and know so little about the sensors they were using. I try to bluff it out by saying that I had NDAs that would not allow me to disclose such information. That did not help and it suddenly dawned on me that instead of lap timing systems they were interviewing me for engine timing systems!

I explained this and stated that they had invited me directly for something different to what the letter had said, that I was unsuitable and that I wished to leave.

The right hand side of the room complained that they had not asked their questions, but I had left the seat already and heading for the door.

They also refused to pay me the promised expenses, and so I was out of pocket for a days holiday and 200 miles of fuel.

The right hand side of the room complained that they had not asked their questions, but I had left the seat already and heading for the door.

Were they complaining to you or to the incompetent nincompoops on the left hand side of the room?

But did Colin get to find out who changed the code? The CTO himslef trying to "fix" other bugs?

I recall an interview I had (50 years ago) as part of my university "milk run" (a job fair where firms have stalls for upcoming graduates). I ended up with three invitations to an interview.

- The first was a two-day affair where there were five of us taking part in site tours, discussions and team exercises (all travel and accommodation reimbursed). I was offered a job; pay was reasonable and I would have taken it if it was the on;y option (though the whole site closed about 30 years later).

- The second was for a civil service post for the UK military. A formal hour-long interview with a panel. Only my second-class rail fare was reimbursed (meals and accommodation was at my expense); I was offered a post at a derisory salary. Ironically, the role was in a field I eventually entered, albeit at a much better reward.

- The third was a one-day affair, an easy drive from my digs. A site tour and several interviews with different people I'd be working for and with. The main interview was with the department's management team and most of the time was spent discussing a solution to a problem one of the senior managers was having with his home hi-fi (I'd had a part-time job in local a high street shop repairing all manner of domestic electrical items, from kettles and washing machines to TVs and hi-fi). I was offered the job at a good salary for the time, which I accepted (it was the one I had really wanted - the other two interviews were my safety net); it was in the years where inflation was running around 2% per month and, by the time I'd graduated and started work, my salary had already increased by around 20%.

I had five very enjoyable years working there and the experience (and their name - a household one with a very high reputation) stood me in good stead when it came time to move on. I've always been thankful I'd had that part-time job - it had had nothing to do with my degree studies (and I'd only taken it because the owner's daughter had a friend I wanted to date)!!