>but I also had a number of "just trust me when I say that you should give me this job" type answers. Is that really so far out? In many lines of work, you're

>but I also had a number of "just trust me when I say that you should give me this job" type answers. Is that really so far out? In many lines of work, you're expected to be trained into the position. My experience in software is that each company thinks they want someone who already knows X, Y, and Z, and can hit the ground running with no training. But in reality, the hire will likely spend more time maintaining P & Q, and working on S, and will need quite a bit of domain knowledge as well as knowledge of the company's custom code and practices and internal organization before they're fully ramped up. And by the time they'd even get to work on X, Y, and Z, the company has likely moved on to A, B, and C, which almost everyone there is just learning. It's a job that requires constant learning, and you're going to need to train your new hires whether you like it or not. That's why when I'm called on to be the one asking questions, I mostly look for whether they enjoy learning and experimenting, whether they can have fun with old stuff and convey the differences between that and the new stuff (and why they're different), and whether they're open-minded or stubbornly convinced that they know the one true way. That's the sort of thing you need when your old system has a decade+ of custom code and the dust hasn't even settled on the new system enough for the pros to know the right ways to do things with it yet. What you really need is someone with basic skills that's also open to being trained and learning new things.