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Are interview questions this irrelevant? Because there are relevant questions you could ask a carpenter in an interview, like if they've worked with I-joists, w
by alricb 12y ago
Are interview questions this irrelevant? Because there are relevant questions you could ask a carpenter in an interview, like if they've worked with I-joists, whether they know what a nailing schedule is, whether they're familiar with a "California corner", their health and safety knowledge, etc.
- geon 12y agoIt is obviously an exaggeration, but Java/Javascript confusion is a real thing.
- Swizec 12y agoAs you can tell, this article was not written by somebody who knows carpentry. It's also supposed to be funny. But yes and no, interview questions can be this irrelevant. This is a litmus test. It tells you that you should treat this company as a client, not as an employer, play the expert card, and charge 3x your normal rate. Because they don't know what they're doing, and will likely gladly pay somebody who does know and can explain it to "the suits".
- perdunov 12y agoI would say that passing interviews is a separate skill, different than doing actual work. They are not completely different, of course, but different. This implies that the irrelevance is pretty high, otherwise you would not need to prepare specifically for interviews.
- vonmoltke 12y agoThat is a serious flaw in the typical interview process. An interview is supposed to screen people based on whether or not they can do actual work. If you are really screening for some parallel skill, then your hires are going to be a crapshoot.
- frostmatthew 12y agoThis is true of any job though. Even though there is a difference between "interview coding" and "real life coding" an advantage of our profession is that we can have interviews that can give more insight into how someone will do their job than just asking them questions. Imagine hiring a manager - you can't "whiteboard" management.
- iopq 12y agoI was interviewing for a webdev position and they had me solve some kind of a crossword puzzle interview question. Clearly if I just practiced messing around with double indexed arrays I would have passed it. But seriously, webdev is mostly about making controllers and interfacing the database. NOTHING to do with how fast I can implement some algorithm.
- rprospero 12y agoIf you did ask about I-joists, there'd be a series of articles on Carpentry News complaining about how you ask overly academic interview questions. Carpenters with "fifteen years of experience" would talk about how they haven't made a single I-joist since they were an apprentice. If they ever needed to make a "California Corner", they'd just look it up on YouTube and it's pointless to expect them to know it off the top of their head. They'd then explain that what you really should be asking in the interview is a series of questions about the specific wavelengths of light reflected by different brands of brown paint, because painting things brown is 95% of what a carpenter does and the rest is just wood-gluing together prefab parts from the factory.