Re: a question regarding resumes

[zwicky <zwicky@pterodactyl.neu.sgi.com>]

 >	I have 20 or 30 questions like this that I've used at interviews.
 >Someone who can say something reasonable to over 50% of them is GOOD.  

I like asking rather loose but technical questions, like "Can you
describe for me what happens when a job is printed?" (Note: The superior
candidate starts this answer by asking what kind of printer and what
kind of computer I want to know for, to which I say "Whatever you're
most familiar with.") I've tried asking people how a computer gets
from a host name to a machine address -- I used to hope for a coherent
answer to this one, but that proved to be over-optimistic. Most candidates
are doing well if they can produce any *one* of NIS, DNS, or the host file,
as a buzzword without having a clue as to how it might function. Many of
them have to have soothing hints to get that far. A significant percentage
of them never do, and one provided a slightly hallucinatory description
of how ARP works, and then tried to convince me that I was simply wrong
and all UNIX machines broadcast queries to map host names to addresses. 
(Needless to say, he didn't get the job -- being *wrong* is OK. Being
wrong and thinking you're right is dangerous. Being wrong, thinking
you're right, and being unwilling to discuss the matter, is completely
unacceptable.)

I never ask detail questions, mostly because I find that once I'm being
interviewed for a job, *I* become unable to answer questions like
"Does NFS use TCP or UDP?" and "What does the -v option to grep do?" to
name two favorite questions of acquaintances. 

	Elizabeth Zwicky
	zwicky@neu.sgi.com