Re: vague interview opener questions are irksome

At 9:46 AM -0400 5/5/04, Terrence Brannon wrote:
>The questions that I hate to hear at the start of an interview are:
>
>* "So who is Terrence Brannon"
>
>* "Why don't you tell me a little bit about what you've been doing"
>
>My desired answer to both of these is "RTFR" - read the $#expletive resume



It's the entire interview process that's demeaning and frustrating. 
If you're going to marry someone, you date them for months or maybe 
years, perhaps move in together beforehand. But to decide whether you 
want to work with a group of people, spending more of your waking 
hours with them than you will with your spouse, you go in and get 
asked a series of irrelevent questions like "why are manhole covers 
round,"  and "write some Perl code to count the number of items in a 
binary tree," and then everyone makes a life-altering choice based on 
that. Nobody ever asks how hard you'll work for them, whether you'll 
make their problems your own or turn it off at 5:00pm, whether you'll 
just collect a paycheck or whether you'll make everyone around you 
better. They never ask that kind of thing, nor can they find out in a 
3-hour interview, nor do they seem to care these days. I can't count 
the number of times I've been asked, "What's the difference between 
'my' and 'local'?" but I've NEVER been asked, "Are you a hard 
worker?" or, "Will you help us succeed?" Why is that?