Cottleston Pie

Heidi has some good non-advice about interviewing that struck me as useful since I've some friends looking for jobs recently and thinking about resumes and interviews.

While none of my friends were law students looking for internships, a lot of the advice probably carries over.

For myself, similar to Heidi's Florida State issue, when I graduated from Duke, all my interviewers used to think that asking about basketball would be a great idea. It wasn't. (Though I've a healthy pedigree of Duke fandom to call up should the need arise. I did it all for the fun social aspects while I was there and I wasn't really interested with what went on on the court per se.) Yes, I think I've had a number of time-spending interviewers like she describes.

That's what I was thinking anyway, until I thought about if someone were to interview with me. :-) I had an opportunity to interview a couple people a few years ago, and rather enjoyed it. And as interviewer, I'm little interested in what an interviewee has as personal interests that don't impact their potential job performance.

At an interview, I like to focus on how he or she would go about solving problems and communicates. And I'd probably ask hard questions that might make him think I was out to trick him into showing weakness or giving an incorrect answer. And that paranoia might lead you to do the exact opposite of what I'd like.

If I were to ask hard question, I'd rather hear about how you'd go find the answer than have a half-baked answer pulled from your head. I might not even know the answer to questions I ask. I just have some idea how to find them.

And for programming related work, I'd probably test that you won't be reinventing the wheel. If I ask about sorting data, I don't want to hear how you'd code a sorter. I want to hear about how you'll use one that's already available. Life is too short and the need to sort data too common to continually re-invent it. A discussion of the tradeoffs of various algorithms might be interesting though, not because of how it relates to sorting, but because it speaks to how you think about tradeoffs. Engineering is continually about tradeoffs.

That all said, I might be an exception. And for those of you familiar with the DISC profiles, my approach is that of a someone with high D and C tendencies.