The joy of interviewing
Some developers just can’t develop: Interesting blog post about mistakes made when hiring people, and how to avoid them.
Looking at it from the other side, I seem to have the inverse problem, sort of… I suspect I don’t interview very well. I have a hard time “selling” myself, at least in person or in phone interviews. I may have Python experience out the wazoo, but (as the article indicates as well) many interviewers are impressed by confident attitudes, and that is harder for me to do.
I also seem to have a problem with interview questions about SQL, for some reason. This is pretty weird, since *every* project I worked on professionally had a relational database behind it, and I was always involved in writing and maintaining SQL (sometimes as the sole designer and maintainer). I’ve worked with MS SQL Server, MySQL, Postgres, Access, heck, even Paradox… and yet when an SQL question comes up I often draw a blank somehow, like I’m a !@#$ beginner.
So, needless to say, these things are a bit of an obstacles in my current search for a job. :-) I’m not sure what to do about it… bragging about my achievements, or overselling myself, makes me feel like an idiot… and I don’t know what causes the SQL issue, as I am perfectly comfortable behind an SQL prompt.
But who knows, maybe somebody will read this, look at my resume, and contact me for an interview, taking the above into account. ;-)
Grant Rettke said,
August 30, 2009 @ 10:23 am
This is one of those cases where you can’t trust your feelings and you need to do what the market demands; at least for 80% of the jobs out there.
Liam McLennan said,
August 30, 2009 @ 10:30 pm
I suggest practice. Having done dozens of interviews, on both sides of the desk, I am now 100x better at it than I used to be.
Confidence is extremely important. Interviewers judge your ability to perform based on your confidence. If you look like you’re not confident then why should they think that you can handle the job?
Paddy3118 said,
August 31, 2009 @ 12:29 am
You could try a bit of ‘simulated annealing’.
Sit down and blatantly oversell yourself in a new resume. Make it over the top, but still tentatively rooted in reality.
Read it out loud. To someone else if you can. Several times.
Have a laugh, then sit down and compare it with your other resumes.
If you take out the lies, and reduce some of the exaggeration, what is left?
Repeat as necessary….
All the best!
Vll said,
August 31, 2009 @ 6:54 am
Why won’t you brag about your achievements? Explain more about what they do etc.
If I was the interviewer, I’d hire the guy who did Wax in a heartbeat.