March 15, 2016 – Tech in the Trenches

Recently, I hired my teammate, then shortly after that my replacement and I went scouring the web for interview questions. Because that’s what you do when you have no idea what you’re doing.

I didn’t find this until now but I absolutely love it.

Suppose you could design your dream job that you’ll be starting on Monday. It’s at your ideal company with your ideal job title and salary. All you have to do is tell them what you want to do at your job and you can have it. What does your job entail?

Just like all good questions, it’ not about the answer. It’s about where the question takes you. The immediacy means what do you want to do now and not months or years from now.

At the end of the interview, he’ll sum things up. For example:

Okay, so let me see if I have this correct. In your ideal job, you’d be spending 75% of the day writing code (JavaScript, if possible) and 25% of your day meeting with others to discuss technology and code. You’d prefer to be on a team of about 5 people and you’d like to be mentored by someone with more experience than you. Is that right?

And when it summation matches inspiration, the reason for this question:

The reason I ask this question to people is because I believe it’s important to match people up to the correct position. I wanted to get to know you and your career goals to make sure we have a good fit for you. What I’d like to do now is tell you what I’m looking for and we can decide together if it seems like we have a fit. Does that sound okay?

That’s the interview I want to be in. With an interviewer who has an eye to the current needs and to the future. Since bored people quit. It’s good to know boredom isn’t in the game plan.

“When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.”

And things started making a little more sense to me. All this anger we see from people screaming “All Lives Matter” in response to black protesters at rallies. All this anger we see from people insisting that their “religious freedom” is being infringed because a gay couple wants to get married. All these people angry about immigrants, angry about Muslims, angry about “Happy Holidays,” angry about not being able to say bigoted things without being called a bigot…

They all basically boil down to people who have grown accustomed to walking straight at other folks, and expecting them to move. So when “those people” in their path don’t move — when those people start wondering, “Why am I always moving out of this guy’s way?”; when those people start asking themselves, “What if I didn’t move? What if I just kept walking too?”; when those people start believing that they have every bit as much right to that aisle as anyone else — it can seem like their rights are being taken away.

Every issue has two sides. It’s important to understand and acknowledge where the other side is coming from if you hope to ever bridge the gap.

Carl T. Holscher fights for the customers.

Day: March 15, 2016

My favorite interview question

‘When You’re Accustomed to Privilege, Equality Feels Like Oppression’

“When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.”