[sharemywin]

So, your offering a job rewriting the internet...that's pretty cool. Oh, right it's just another CRUD job. Also, why not write all your interview questions down on a piece of paper and leave them for an hour with internet access. If they still can't answer your questions then you have a problem. And, if there a gaps maybe train them a little bit. I think if everyone stopped wasting so much time looking for ninjas, experts, and unicorns and started hiring people the world would be a lot better off.

[r2dnb]

I totally agree with this comment. The questions he asks sound really old school to me. This interview style seems very academic, you should focus on their technical maturity for the role, and wonder if they'll be productive in a real world scenario (with Google). I find this sort of gotcha questions pointless.

I like to gauge the maturity of candidates, but I make sure to never use gotcha questions. I propose them comfortable real world scenarios, and help them show the best of their thought process.

I've interviewed many people who were very good at answering this kind of theoretical questions but were short on delivery when I proposed them the test project supposed to demonstrate how readily they use these concepts in real world situations.

Quite frankly, it looks like the author has the graduate syndrome : http://read.reddy.today/read/10/the-graduate-syndrome

[anshumanravi]

Hi, Agree that interview should be less academic, but academic knowledge does matter. it’s not really about how much candidate can answer , for that written/technical test is enough, IMHO Personal interview meant to find out how candidate approaches to solution, And thats when its disappointing when candidate would say I know what “db indexing” does but do not know how. If one do not know how, it signifies candidate is not interested( or capable) enough to know problem and thus if selected chances of him/her writing erroneous code would be more. .

[r2dnb]

I understand where you're coming from, but the thing is asking :

- What is DB indexing

- Can you think of any impact when indexing in this situation

- What are you general thoughts about indexing, can you think of an example when you used it and how it helped.

Will indeed give you insight into how he approaches problems and his maturity. But the difference with this and : tell me how indexing works behind the scenes, is that you focus on what really matters.

With that there is no right or wrong answers, there's just insightful answers.

I do not disagree on the fact that fundamental knowledge is important, but I disagree on the way you assess it. I disagree on the notion that there is an equivalence between fundamental knowledge and formal knowledge. One can be comfortable adding things up without knowing that it is called an addition.

If he does : great, if he doesn't it doesn't matter as long as he has the insight.

More generally the majority of our knowledge is not formal.

[anshumanravi]

> - What is DB indexing

Yeah I asked exactly same question, And instead of answering what it i, candidtate told me why they used it.

> - Can you think of any impact when indexing in this situation

That's Why I want to know if candidate understand what really index does, One cant tell a realistic answer of this question until S(h)e knows how index works.

> - What are you general thoughts about indexing, can you think of an example when you used it and how it helped.

Even if one used it in some situation in pastm and it helped, I would consider it not enough as it could be possible S(h)e used it by reading some blog/tutorial etc without understanding it fully, it's like ok switch it off and on, did it work? well forget about it then.

[mattkenefick]

Sounds like you were one of the interviewees.

[sharemywin]

I have a job now but I went through the interview process recently. It was actually the opposite. because I didn't have a lot of experience in the newest versions and didn't come off real confident, I got passed on a lot. never mind in the last 3 years I helped deliver a 20m project in language I never used before and in my spare time learned lua to build a mobile app. One of the interviewers comments was "I think he could do the job he's just didn't come off well in the interview." WTF? Didn't even get a chance to do the're little coding challenge.