Interview tip: what's the real question

re: Interview tip: what's the real question

Russell Osterlund — Tue, 01 Jan 2008 19:06:16 GMT

BTW - Happy Holidays! The interview loop you mentioned is a great example of communication skills; the second questions is succinct allowing little opportunity for guessing. While I will agree that the interview process is never "a fair playing field", I would maintain that team chemistry is the most important goal during the mating dance. And establishing how well each side communicates goes a long way towards reaching that goal. Just my opinion.

re: Interview tip: what's the real question

Mike Stall - MSFT — Tue, 01 Jan 2008 00:11:20 GMT

I think this is a case of "you can be right or you can be happy".

IMO, The interview process is not a fair playing field. Ideally, people would say exactly what they mean.

Although you could argue that this could lead to extremely verbose conversations, and that you expect a good candidate to be able to have the intuition to accurately infer unspoken context.

I heard a story of an interview loop where a candidate over analyzed a question with Interviewer #1. The next interview on the loop told him "I hear you're a really smart guy. However, I'm going to ask you a simple question and I'm looking for a simple answer"

re: Interview tip: what's the real question

Russell Osterlund — Mon, 31 Dec 2007 21:11:00 GMT

I respectfully disagree as your advice rests on the word "probably". The question needs to fashioned in a manner that avoids ambiguity; otherwise the candidate is placed in the hopeless position of guessing what the *real* question is. Imagine what would happen if computer languages or library interfaces comunicated this way - chaos. For example, a program (interviewer) calls GetVersion and KERNEL32 (interviewee) decides that the question is "Is this Vista?"