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.

1. Make a personal web page.
2. Link to it on your resume
3. Cover it with animated gifs
4. Make sure all of the tables have 2 pixel borders
5. 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”.
6. Mention that your hobby is dumpster diving. Post samples of things you’ve found in other peoples trash.
7. Make a links page that points to your interests.
8. On that links page, include a section for links to conspiracy web sites
9. And a bunch of pages about how to cure people of homosexuality
10. And sites about how Barney the dinosaur (yeah, from like 1996) should die
11. Include a picture of sesame street’s Grover taking a crap on a toilet
12. 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.