Interviewing
Spent a fair amount of time the last week interviewing candidates for an entry-level position we have open. I have to admit, in some cases I was a bit surprised by how they went, so I thought I’d share some of my opinions on how you might approach an interview (this’ll be brief, don’t fear!).
1) SELL YOURSELF. Omg, don’t give one word answers to open-ended questions! I’m giving you very open questions to get you to talk about yourself – don’t make me have to drag out answers. If the question is something like the old chestnut, “Do you prefer working as an individual or in a team environment?” don’t try and cover all bases and say “Both.” Be decisive and elaborate. Based on other questions you know I’m going to ask you to elaborate anyways, so just leap in. Give frank and candid answers. Go ahead and give examples without me having to hit you with a cattle prod. You’re on stage here with all the spotlights on you – run with it and shine! Eye contact is good too. Watch your body language – ’cause I am…
2) DO YOUR HOMEWORK. I gave you our website address up front. Go there. Read about us. Maybe even formulate some questions. Show me you care enough about the job that you did a little research ahead of time. Wanna impress me in an interview? Mention you’ve been all over our website. Ask questions about the business model or product lines. Inquire about competition and/or advantages. etc. etc.
3) DRESS FOR IT. Ok sure, the world has moved on to business casual for the most part (I’ll spare you my rant on that topic; besides, I’ve caved in too…). And I won’t hire or not hire a person just based on what they wore to an interview, that would be grossly irresponsible. BUT, you’re here to sell yourself and first impressions count. I’m not even suggesting a suit and tie here (although I personally, at a minimum, would go with a sport coat and tie.). Even if you know the office is biz-cas, dress nice. Maybe even peel off your parka at the door.
Now granted, the position is entry-level and that will affect how some folks ‘approach’ their interview. And not every candidate had ‘issues’ related to the above points, but I have to confess I was startled a bit.
Brother's Laptop
So, the brother and I decided to go pick up a new hard drive for his laptop. He actually got a small upgrade out of the deal, since the smallest we found was 40GB at 5400 rpm which is an improvement over his old 30GB 4200 drive. We got it installed easily enough and then looked at it thinking “now what?” You see, we had all the media we needed, but his XP license was at home. Being the law-abiding citizens that we are…
Well, I’d also been touting the benefits of OpenOffice.org and Firefox to him a bit over the weekend. And he was curious about Linux. And I had CentOS cds laying on my desk from a recent server install. “Why not?” we thought to ourselves… so we did.
The install went smoothly. The network was up, had to do the usual wrangling around to find the GPG key for the rhn update service (centos uses it, but points to their stuff) and got all patched and updated. Then we figured we really needed to get the wireless network working and that was the beginning of the end. His linksys 54g card isn’t overly supported and, out of the box, we couldn’t get it working. Sadly enough, I couldn’t remember which channel my WAP was on and we lost over an hour as I tracked down the latest configuration software for it (it seems if you use the wrong version of config software that doesn’t match your WAP bios you kill it quite nicely 
). Finally got my wap back online (*cough*) and got back to working on his laptop but just couldn’t get it to go – even with my old trusty Linksys WPC11 802.11b card. As I poked around I realized that centos might be missing some of the stuff I’ve used before for wifi, since last time I did this it was pretty much a no-brainer with RedHat. By now it was quite late on Sunday night and we gave up for the night.
While I was at work on Monday he had a little bit of time and was playing around. Managed to go find and download OO and Firefox but the installations were problematic since he wasn’t completely sure what he had (kernel/distro/arch). All the command line steps were a bit troublesome as well. He had the archives over in /tmp and thought he got it all installed by double-clicking using the GUI. Unfortunately, after a reboot /tmp is cleared… LOL! Oops, yeah there’s some learning curve. hehe.
Monday night we all went out to a steakhouse for the daughter’s birthday meal. Great meal and had fun. Then we came home, she had some friends over and we opened presents and did cake and ice cream. After we got the kids all settled, brother and i headed back downstairs for more of the battle. But.. quite frankly… we were tired and not very ambitious. Although he’s very intrigued by the linux scene, we reached the conclusion that without wifi working for his card the laptop just wouldn’t serve his purposes and determined that he would head home and put XP back on it, but also install OpenOffice.org and Firefox. He’s also considering trying again with Fedora core 3 next time…
So, the usual linux story: Installs are down to being just dead simple and everything worked right out of the box. But for some components you really have to do some research and spend the time to get it all working and, in this case, we just didn’t have the time to do it right.
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