Job interview observations

I’ve had quite a few phone and face-to-face interviews this past month in my job search. A few of them have been refreshingly interesting, and also effective. A few have been truly dreadful. Most fall somewhere in between, of course. However good or bad, though, I think I’ve learned at least something from each one—either something about myself or something about the job interview process.

A few things stand out in my mind from what I consider to be the most effective interviews:

1. They were balanced. I felt that I learned as much about them as individuals and as a company as they learned about me on a personal, professional and technical level. How do you know you will be happy working somewhere if they don’t let you learn about them, too?

2. They were comfortable. I didn’t feel pressure to dress or act a certain way, or like I was a suspect being interrogated. The interviewers and I had real, two-way conversations, not just question and answer exchanges. I always came away from these feeling like I had just met some very nice, and very talented professionals.

3. Their evaluation of my technical skills went beyond the common (and in my opinion, useless) reference book questions. An example of the worst is the classic “What is the difference between public, private, protected, and default access permissions in Java?”. “Why are manhole covers round?” is just as useless, imho. The best ones required that I devise a solution to a small, but interesting computer science-y or real-world problem. Some involved writing code, others involved drawing architecture diagrams or object models. All of them involved explaining my thought process and my solution.