| I'm curious: is this not solved by a solid technical interview? I would have guessed that if someone impresses HR, you could find out if they really know their stuff by getting a KNOWN competent person to ask them lots of hard technical questions, make them solve problems on the spot, etc. A friend recently gave me a great example of how to do open-ended questions and probe someone's knowledge: ask a question like "when you type in a web address and hit enter, what happens?" The answer can range from "your computer loads the page" to delving into DNS, IP routing, HTTP headers, server load management, server-side processing, sessions, database access, cookies, browser rendering, etc etc. If the candidate gives a simple answer, you can continue to probe different areas to see how much they know in each one. The trick is that the interviewer has to be competent enough to tell what the candidate knows and whether he/she will BS rather than admit not knowing something (which is also important to find out). If you don't already have anyone competent enough to conduct the interview - maybe you're hiring your first programmer - you could temporarily hire someone who comes highly recommended to help you with the interview process. So, was this guy vetted like this on technical merits, or did he just talk impressively to non-technical people? I'm curious to know how he slipped through. |
That's why there are so many hangups during the interview process that have nothing to do with a person's actual skill in a given area..like font choice on a resume, or little tips like how to sit in a chair or whatever. Those are all little tells that people look for in an interview, but candidates also know this, so they try to game the system by appearing confident, showing up precisely 15 minutes early with a binder full of extra copies of their resume, just the right amount of hair gel, etc. Because by and large, in fields outside of technical ones, that's how you get a job.
> So, was this guy vetted like this on technical merits, or did he just talk impressively to non-technical people? I'm curious to know how he slipped through.
But yeah, this is actually how he kept slipping through. His interviewers were hiring him for expertise in his field that they themselves did not have. Pretty much it was bureaucrats and administrators hiring somebody for a particular skill requirement. They simply didn't know how to dig more than a level or two deep. In the same way that a person can game the hiring system like I mentioned above, he could do the same for his field. Somebody who was actually in the field would have to spend a little time to figure out that he didn't know the equivalent that computers need electricity to operate. But he could talk for hours about how for example, a browser operates with DNS servers to resolve IP addresses -- and do it with authority (again, as a very rough equivalent).
You could even ask him to produce a plan of action for the next six months and he could produce a pretty good outline, good enough for an interview, but ask him to fill in the details and he couldn't.