| "Why do you insist the candidate reads your mind?" The Guess What I'm Thinking strategy to dating, err, job hunting. More fun than the brogrammer Mensa puzzle bar-raiser hazing ritual. But whatcha gonna do? We still have to play the game. My last crash and burn was in response to "Give us an example of a disagreement and how you handled it." So I did. I'm honest to a fault. [Non-programming manager specified a buzzword compliant "architecture" that simply didn't work. We tried, but every JMS we tried failed under load testing, and the upstream wouldn't accept our PR. And we had run out of time. So I came up with something super simple which just worked, as-in couldn't fail. And it flew and was easy to debug and turned out great, a major selling point. But I kinda didn't actually tell the manager we didn't use JMS, at the time. Who cares? It's internal (non-customer facing). Further, the manager was an erratic maintenance alcoholic, and I just wasn't up for another food fight.] These two interviewers lost their minds. Incredulous. Couldn't let this go. Repeatedly hammered me on this point. The shift in mood was dramatic. Definitely not in the "better to ask for forgiveness" camp. Weird, for a startup. So while both party thought the other insane, I think the interview questions worked as needed, preventing us from working together. |