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by DanielBMarkham
6044 days ago
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Good advice. You can also play the old mentalist trick. The mentalist knows nothing of his audience, yet it appears he has amazing powers of telepathy. How does he do it? He throws out a lot of information, then closely watches for a response, keying off of positive responses from the subject. As he gets more and more subvocal, body-language, and affirmations from his subject, he closes in on information that only the subject knows. You can do the same thing in an interview. When asked a question, tell a story about how you solved a problem (which is why you're there) While telling it, listen closely for clues that you have touched on something of value. If you hear them, next time you tell a story keep close to that sore spot. Usually over a period of six or seven questions you can hone in on what the problem is while reassuring the interviewer with stories that you know how to help them. |
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Here's an example of what I mean. Suppose you're a Java/Struts developer historically, but have some serious Ruby on Rails experience recently. You come across a job listing for a RoR developer, with all the right RoR talk in the description with "experience with Java/Struts a plus" at the bottom.
You go into the interview and just nail all the RoR questions. They are happy, you're happy, and they ask you if you have any questions, so you ask them to describe their project. As you play mentalist you discover that they really are using Java 1.4 and Struts 1.38 and want someone to come on and maintain that old code while hoping that some day management will let them rewrite the whole app in RoR. They want you there in case management agrees and to "train" the others in RoR just in case it happens.
They extend you a job offer. You decline and go after a real RoR opportunity with a hot startup. Life is good.