Tales from another interview

27Jan10

Today I felt really bad.

I had an interview scheduled by a person of the company (let’s call company A) in which I am completing a 3-months training period. He told me the interview was to get a consulting job I eventually had to do in a company (let’s call it C). Noone tells me what kind of project I will be put at work. Arriving at the meeting in front of the building of company C, I was introduced to a third person that works for company B. After a coffee and some generic chats, the person of company A leaves, and while we were on our way to the office, the B person tells me that I should say, during the interview, that I am completing the training in his company, not in company A, and that he rewrote some parts of my cv.

This is exactly when I started feeling bad. Why in the world should you rewrite my professional life? Without telling me what you wrote! But let’s go ahead, we’ll get back to it later.

Arrived at company C we wait for about 40 minutes in a room, and after that, two person show up, introduce themselves, and take me to a room to get the interview started.

First question: “What would you like to say to us?”, like if I already knew everything about them, like who they were and what kind of business they ran…I started telling some details of my training, what technologies and Java framework I used. They seemed happy and interested, and went on asking me something about my Master Thesis. As I finished talking, they asked me if I ever used some XML parsing library/tool: I never used one, but I told them that I am aware there are two different approaches (based on DOM or based on events).

Getting back to my rewrote cv, I saw the copy the interviewers were reading: it had a nice heading with company B’s logo on, and it reported I had skills in “Oracle sql server”. I would have never wrote that line, for two reasons:

I don’t have any skills in Oracle databases;
I don’t know what “Oracle sql server” actually is, since a quick search on google reports just 688,000 results for that. It is nothing if we compare it with 81,600,000 results for “Oracle”. Just to confirm that it does not refer to an Oracle product in any way, and was deliberately written there.

Next question: “Do you know what Dojo is?” “Yes, I know it is a kind of javascript framework to implement easily some UI effects, but I never used it”.

That was the last one they asked me.

Then they gave me the opportunity to ask something about them, so I said:

“What kind of projects are you running at this time?”

“Projects with Java. We need a profile quite like yours. “

…enlighting!

The whole thing lasted 7 minutes.

I don’t know if I’d be happy to work in a team where managers need just 7 minutes to screen and evaluate a future team member.

What about you?

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5 Responses to “Tales from another interview”

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1 Claudio on 27 January, 2010 said:

well… actually if I were you I would wait to write this down. Just to see how it goes. (But yes, I’m too paranoid.)
ciao

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- 2 mox601 on 27 January, 2010 said:
  
  I thought about that and I think there is nothing wrong in expressing my thoughts here, since it is a personal blog. Not to mention that I made unrecognisable all the involved actors and the meaningful informations: how could I work for a company called ‘B’ or ‘C’?
  
  Reply
  - 3 mox601 on 27 January, 2010 said:
    
    I might reconsider my position:
    if you are a company and you need a person to work in a project with technologies X and Y and you need it delivered by yesterday, it all makes sense. Even the 7 minutes.
    But you could always phone the person and ask “do you know X and Y?”.
    If yes, come by for a real interview, otherwise don’t bother coming.
4 Davide on 27 January, 2010 said:

This is the way the IT scenario actually works in Italy. Be prepared for this, or to move in another country.

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5 Francesco on 31 January, 2010 said:

I agree with Davide… unfortunately that is the situation in Italy. Really very sad…
If you have the possibility, go out Mox, leave this country that is yet a country country governed by people with old mentalities. The guys just came out from university are often only “HR – Human Resources” for mechanical chain: their capabilities, their qualities, their innovative ideas are not seen as resources for the company. According to me, this is a mentality with no future for the company and for the country economy. What makes us unique is our approach and our way of thinking, not our IT skills. These skills can be acquired anytime.
Good luck!

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