How To Ruin Your Interview
If anyone is looking for a way to completely ruin their chances of having a good interview in the software development field, here's how.
- Make a personal web page.
- Link to it on your resume
- Cover it with animated gifs
- Make sure all of the tables have 2 pixel borders
- Post a code sample that generates "funny" fight text between people, like for IRC. Make sure that the nounlist for what the text should call people includes words like "queer", "faggot", "homo","fairy", and "flamer".
- Mention that your hobby is dumpster diving. Post samples of things you've found in other peoples trash.
- Make a links page that points to your interests.
- On that links page, include a section for links to conspiracy web sites
- And a bunch of pages about how to cure people of homosexuality
- And sites about how Barney the dinosaur (yeah, from like 1996) should die
- Include a picture of sesame street's Grover taking a crap on a toilet
- Link to a bunch of crazy gun-nut sites. Make the link an image of barely-clothed women holding guns.
No, I'm not kidding. I'm not going to link to him, but this guy was a fucking loon. We had pretty much decided before he even walked into the office that, unless he's something really special, he's an absolute no. Personality is important to a development team, and this guy is a definite crazy loner type. Not right for the team, even if his skills were good.
The best part, however, was that nobody was comfortable rejecting him for being a crazy person. Luckily, when he asked us what our dev environment was like, I remembered that he had a ton of pro-linux and anti-microsoft animated crap on his links page. I blurted out "It's all Windows."
A minute later, he told us he was no longer interested in the position.
Duke:
I think you don’t want to link to the dudes website cause yer afraid he’ll find it, hunt you down and abort you.
7 July 2006, 5:29 pmDan:
Shit Duke - I’d be a little afraid too. By the way, I like the use of ‘abort’ instead of ‘eliminate’, ’stab’, or ‘choke-slam’.
Anybody that stupid actually might not know the difference between right and wrong. Guess I’m not terribly surprised though, I was halfway through the list when I guessed this was somebody real.
(Hooray for being right, funny how I don’t really feel like a winner though…)
8 July 2006, 8:56 amjess:
you mean…that’s NOT what I should be doing? I DID IT ALL WRONG! *cries*
Oh, a friend of mine interviewed someone for a graphic artist position with some of the exact same problems…when they asked him how he would respond to tension between group members he said he’d talk about those members behind their backs and get the other members to join with him against the ‘bad’ team member.
whooo!
8 July 2006, 4:02 pmEric:
Our most amusing resume to date has been this one guy who wrote his entire resume in the third person. He also gave a reading assignment for a chapter in some programming book that was supposed to give us a good idea of his programming style.
Also along the lines of keeping the right-wing nutcases at bay, we just have to point them to our client’s sites. The Stranger’s especially.
9 July 2006, 3:39 amRod:
One thing I didn’t mention this guy also did was bring in a big long code sample. Now, this isn’t bad alone, we’ve hired another guy who brought a similar sample in, but I am struck by how funny I find this.
Good OO code doesn’t look interesting on its own. If you’re writing OO code, any given object is going to be extremely boring and simple, since it only does one thing, and it should do it in an elegant way. Ideally, your object will be a bunch of getters and setters and one interesting method. In a perfect world, they all fit on 2 or 3 pages. Obviously, that’s now how it always goes in real life, but that’s the idea.
When you bring in a 100 page printout of your object that contains a ton of “clever” code, you don’t get people looking at it and saying “wow, this guy is very clever!” you get people saying “wow, I sure would hate to have to maintain this piece of shit!”.
Don’t bring code samples. Small ones are boring. Big ones are bad. You can’t win.
9 July 2006, 2:43 pmoopla:
Rod, I am writing to suggest that you take down this post. While I am not a lawyer, From what I can see this article could definately come back to bite you in the posterior. In item 11 you remark that having links to fundamentalist religious websites on his website. Unfortunatly, in the eyes of a court that would be religious hiring discrimination. I don’t mean to accuse you Rod, it is just that puting that in print is risky for both you and your employer. If your boss sees it, it could get you fired.
I read through the post and came to the same conclusion that this man has shown that he lacks maturity and proffesionalism. and left me with a nagging fear that he probably observes National Bring your Gun to Work Day.
The key with this is about keeping a partition between your personal and professional Lives. I hope this Breach does not negatively effect you.
11 July 2006, 5:00 pmRod:
oopla,
Like I said, as soon as the guy found out we ran Windows, he declined the offer. I wouldn’t have posted it if we were the ones making the final decision, but I went ahead and shared the humor because he was.
My boss knows about the post.
Not worried. :)
11 July 2006, 10:48 pmoopla:
Good.
12 July 2006, 3:18 am