It's rather weird interviewing people to replace yourself. This has really been the first time I've been deeply involved in the hiring process and it's given me some insights.

1. Hiring decisions are not particularly rational. It is a popularity contest based on a single short meeting. Even under the best of circumstances it is not going to be particularly reasoned out.

2. Applicants really have no way to judge how the person doing the interview feels about them. Unless the interview went very well or very badly, your probably going to get a friendly treatment but non-commital comments on what happens next.

3. You don't want to be the first person to be interviewed for a posistion. The company isn't going to take a posistion on the first one or two, and by the time the others come along their impressions of the first ones will be muted by time. Better to be the last guy before the company commits to making a decision.

4. Typos and mistakes on resumes stand out like horrid stains.

5. If your composing a thought during an interview, better to be silent then flail around with a bunch of ers and ums.

6. I really need to find a way to get some JAVA experience on my resume. The JAVA people where asking for 5 to 10K more then everybody else and where being snapped up.

7. If the interviewer asks you if you can learn something, say yes.

8. If the interviewer asks you some technical question, don't be afraid to ask for more details or admit you don't know what they are asking. Better to admit it upfront then look like your evading or confusing the issue.

9. My Boss is now regretting not offering me a better salary up front. They are hiring a guy with less experience for a higher salary.

10. As an applicant you want to talk about yourself as much as possible but don't wander off into pointless side stories. If the person doing the interview goes into a long winded history of the company or current buisness plans, try to find a point where you can jump in and redirect things back towards your job related skills and abilities. Talk about particularly technical problems you have overcome and how impressive and complex previous projects where. Try to stay focused on things that are related to the job you are applying for. But don't interrupt the interviewer unless you really have some critical point to raise.

Jay

Obviously not knowing the answer is bad. But the people that tried to evade the question when they didn't know the answer came across worse to me.

It could be that this is different though if your not talking to a technical person. With somebody that doesn't know the underlying technology, you will have a much better chance of dodging the question or bulldozing past it with some vauge technical jumble.

When I was interviewing a person and they said something about a perfectly mundane bit of SQL code being strange. I knew right there they didn't have the SQL background they said they did. In this case the mundane code was a table create straight from MSSQL. They acted like the line that dropped the table if it already existed before creating a table was odd. Not only is it quite common on MSSQL, but it's function is also so obvious that any programmer should pick up on what it is for immediatly.

Jay