March 21, 2016 at 10:25 am
tindog (3/21/2016)
What happens when these people actually get the job? Is it not horrendously embarrassing for everyone involved when they turn up and can't perform simple tasks? Are they not concerned about making it through the probation period? I can't understand the point in lying to land a job where you do need to perform, recipe for disaster.
I was on the team with somebody like this. He had been a Business Analyst and lied on resumes and interviews and said he'd been a programmer. He was able to convince my manager and get hired. He couldn't do the work. You could even provide him with pseudo code that would completely accomplish the task he needed to do and he couldn't translate that to real code. He was eventually fired months later, and now he had actual programming experience to put on his resume for the next position, plus months of being paid like a programmer instead of a BA.
March 21, 2016 at 11:04 am
GeorgeCopeland (3/21/2016)
Could not agree more. I am much more interested in how you think and how you work than whether you know all of the parms on a raiserror statement.
Cool. What's the name of your company and the address. I'll send all of the completely useless fakers, posers, and liars that I've had the great misfortune of interviewing over to you good folks. Make sure it's for Senior positions so they can learn as much as possible. 😛
--Jeff Moden
March 21, 2016 at 11:24 am
I would prefer that you send me a good hacker with two years of customer service experience at McDonalds.
March 21, 2016 at 11:32 am
A few years into my career a got a call from an ex-University housemate of a friend of mine who I regularly visited. I didn't know this girl very well but knew her well enough that she was polite, intelligent and could put in the effort. Someone I would have recommended as a trainee if she was interested in IT. She was studying art when I met her. The call was basically that she had managed to get herself her first post-graduation job. As a junior Delphi programmer. Which she claimed she had experience in. Which she didn't. She was bricking it.
The only advice I could give her was to keep her head down and try to learn as she went. It was too late to advise her against the lie she told and too late to teach her anything that evening over the phone from 150 miles away (and she didn't have a computer). I didn't fancy her chances as it was a big leap. I have not heard from her since.
She never should have claimed the experience but part of me hopes that she muddled through and managed to pick up Delphi and become a productive member of her team. The other part of me thinks that she should have failed due to her dishonesty. The reality is that I did not know her situation like how desperate she was, for example. I decided not to judge.
Gaz
-- Stop your grinnin' and drop your linen...they're everywhere!!!
March 21, 2016 at 11:43 am
Jeff Moden (3/21/2016)
ZZartin (3/21/2016)
Hmm.... with the way technology is moving and I find this true in general not just IT the ability to acquire knowledge is far more valuable than the ability to retain knowledge.I do agree that the ability to acquire knowledge is important but there's no way that it's more important than having a DBA or Developer that knows their job, can demonstrate that they've done it in the past, and isn't going to have to spend six months to a year trying to acquire basic knowledge for a Senior position with Senior pay and Senior expectations.
I also won't hire a liar. If someone says on their Resume/CV that they're "highly experienced" in a given area, then I damned well expect that they can prove it during an interview and that is going to require knowledge of what they claim. If they can't, then they're a liar (especially when they fail the simple stuff like during the last 10 years of interviews) and I don't need deceit on my teams. Some will say "Well, they just don't know what they don't know" and to that, I say "bullshit" because it's their bloody job to know. 😉
Well a liar is a liar but just having a bunch of knowledge memorized is also not very valuable if it can't be applied. Looking at all the languages and environments(dozens I want to say?) I've worked in I couldn't tell you the exact syntax or commands or screens for most of them anymore but the things that I accomplished in them I could reproduce.
March 21, 2016 at 1:10 pm
ZZartin (3/21/2016)
Well a liar is a liar but just having a bunch of knowledge memorized is also not very valuable if it can't be applied. Looking at all the languages and environments(dozens I want to say?) I've worked in I couldn't tell you the exact syntax or commands or screens for most of them anymore but the things that I accomplished in them I could reproduce.
BWAAA-HAAA!!! Do you think I ask rote questions the don't require any kind of a discussion? As you say, anyone can memorize enough to get through a "tell me the correct answer" interview.
Also, if you're interviewing someone for a Senior DBA position, don't you think that someone should be able to discuss backups and restores to a great extent even if they don't remember the exact syntax they used? Don't you agree that either a DBA or a Developer should know how to get the current date and time using T-SQL and what the precise syntax is for that? Don't you think that an experienced Developer should be able to write a simple join to update one table from another without having to look anything up anywhere?
Remember that these are all for SENIOR positions. I won't get into the idiots that claim 10 or more years of experience with performance tuning and can't actually tell me what a clustered index is all about or don't know what an execution plan is.
If someone doesn't know that stuff off the top of their head, they shouldn't have it on their resume and they shouldn't be applying for a SENIOR position.
--Jeff Moden
March 21, 2016 at 1:17 pm
Jeff, do you have "BWAAA-HAAA!!!" assigned to a shortcut key?
Gaz
-- Stop your grinnin' and drop your linen...they're everywhere!!!
March 21, 2016 at 1:40 pm
You get some good ones and some that cause dark mutterings for years after.
One had the brass neck to ask me for a LinkedIn recommendation after I'd been through a performance management process with him.
I'm extremely wary of LinkedIn endorsements. I've been endorsed by people I've never heard of for skills I didn't know I had.
March 21, 2016 at 1:56 pm
HR and management like canned pop quiz style technical interviews (ie: What is a clustered index?), because they are straightforward, and they can add up the scores and easily stack rank all the candidates afterward. However, the fact of the matter is that I could coach my ten year old kid how to pass one of these things without only a weekend of preparation.
Below are examples of more insightful questions that can be asked of a candidate.
"Tell me about locking, blocking, and deadlocking. For example, why are they an important feature of a relational database, and how are the three related?"
"Tell me about an interesting performance issue you've had to troubleshoot in production rececently. How did you identify and resolve the root cause?"
What I expect is a five minute long two way discussion for each question, where I ask follow up questions and the candidate goes into more detail. Afterward, I rank the candidate on a meangingful 1 - 5 scale.
1 - blank stare, crickets chirping ... How did they get here?
2 - Some hits but mostly misses. Candidate has some experience but not at the level required for position.
3 - Mostly hits. Baseline average candidate meeting basic requirements.
4 - Impressive solid candidate deserving a 2nd interview.
5 - Brilliant answers all around and clearly the best of the lot. I could learn from this candidate.
"Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Instead, seek what they sought." - Matsuo Basho
March 21, 2016 at 2:16 pm
Gary Varga (3/21/2016)
Jeff, do you have "BWAAA-HAAA!!!" assigned to a shortcut key?
No. Ran out of shortcut keys for "BS", "WTF", "NFW", "Seriously", and a couple of more. 🙂
--Jeff Moden
March 21, 2016 at 3:44 pm
Then, of course, there are the opposite situations:
I was interviewed for a Senior SQL Dev position a while back. First question they asked was the differences between Truncate and Delete. So I told them. For five minutes. They didn't stop me. Probably because they were "tharn" (glassy eyed in shock) after the first couple of sentences.
On a 1-5 scale, I'd give that interview a 1. They knew they wanted to ask technical questions, but they hadn't the faintest clue what to do with the answers. (They made me an offer, but I turned it down for other reasons.)
It does go both ways.
On the interviewing side, I don't ask syntax questions. I start a conversation. "What do you like about Try-Catch in T-SQL? Anything you dislike about it?" Not "What's the syntax?" or "What are the options in a Catch block?" Reveals a lot more.
- Gus "GSquared", RSVP, OODA, MAP, NMVP, FAQ, SAT, SQL, DNA, RNA, UOI, IOU, AM, PM, AD, BC, BCE, USA, UN, CF, ROFL, LOL, ETC
Property of The Thread
"Nobody knows the age of the human race, but everyone agrees it's old enough to know better." - Anon
March 21, 2016 at 7:09 pm
The SQL world is like the Wild West. I have stories similar to everyone on this thread and have also been interviewed by idiots. I'll offer some advice to people in this thread that are looking to make a few extra bucks...
Though I have not posted my resume in years I get recruiter phone calls all the time. If they're a decent & reputable company I'll speak to them, let them know I'm not on the market, then offer to do tech screens for them for a reasonable 3-figure hourly fee. My policy is a one hour minimum (resume review, prep and a 30 minute+ tech screen) but, if the resume is terrible or obvious BS, I reject the interview and don't charge them. I've been doing it for 2+ years now; it's been going well.
-- Itzik Ben-Gan 2001
March 22, 2016 at 1:45 am
David.Poole (3/21/2016)
...I'm extremely wary of LinkedIn endorsements. I've been endorsed by people I've never heard of for skills I didn't know I had.
Me too. I have been asked to endorse people but I have only endorsed someone in the technologies that I have personally seen them apply. I have also made it quite clear that I was happy to do that and no more.
Gaz
-- Stop your grinnin' and drop your linen...they're everywhere!!!
March 22, 2016 at 7:50 am
Gary Varga (3/22/2016)
David.Poole (3/21/2016)
...I'm extremely wary of LinkedIn endorsements. I've been endorsed by people I've never heard of for skills I didn't know I had.Me too. I have been asked to endorse people but I have only endorsed someone in the technologies that I have personally seen them apply. I have also made it quite clear that I was happy to do that and no more.
Just for kicks, I'll occasionally endorse a co-worker for skills like 'taxidermy' or 'pole dancing' hoping it will show up on their LinkedIn profile. 🙂
"Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Instead, seek what they sought." - Matsuo Basho
March 22, 2016 at 8:09 am
Eric M Russell (3/22/2016)
Gary Varga (3/22/2016)
David.Poole (3/21/2016)
...I'm extremely wary of LinkedIn endorsements. I've been endorsed by people I've never heard of for skills I didn't know I had.Me too. I have been asked to endorse people but I have only endorsed someone in the technologies that I have personally seen them apply. I have also made it quite clear that I was happy to do that and no more.
Just for kicks, I'll occasionally endorse a co-worker for skills like 'taxidermy' or 'pole dancing' hoping it will show up on their LinkedIn profile. 🙂
Thanks for the heads up. I'll keep an eye out 😉
Gaz
-- Stop your grinnin' and drop your linen...they're everywhere!!!
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