The Dark and Obscure Art of the Phone Interview

[nonnihil]

Being in the midst of a job hunt, I am doing a lot of phone interviews. Because I hate phone interviews with the burning fury of a thousand suns, I would very much prefer that the phone interviews that must be conducted yield a maximum amount of useful information in a minimum of time, so that I don't have to do, eg, four or more phone interviews

Comments

[firstfrost]

Note to Company E: "Dictate a quicksort implementation in C

I really want C to be a variable too. :)

[dcltdw]

Quicksort? Quicksort?!?

Hahahaha that's funny. :)

Still, it's quite nice that these companies ruled themselves out during the phone screen. "I'm sorry, I'm sure your company is filled with nice people, but I'm looking for something at least an order of magnitude less stupid." Well, alright, that's not exactly productive, but I've been in situations where I've answered, "I don't know; I'd look it up" and then closely watched for the reaction. If they blinked and said "oh, right, that's what I would do", they pass. If they nervously nodded and said "that's okay; we'll just move on", that's a big check mark against them.

[narya]

"If he can write quicksort in C over the phone, just think what he could do in person!"

[arcanology]

There's also a definite advantage to being able to skip the phone interview step.

[nonnihil]

Indeed: Among other things, it vaults a company directly into that celestial realm of "Companies nonnihil doesn't find himself wanting to swear and throw bricks at after hanging up the phone," a place to which few dare to aspire and fewer still can reach.

[benndragon]

The Quicksort question is incredibly dumb is because *I* could come up with an answer to that and I haven't coded a damn thing since that one undergrad class in Java - I'm an ex-biologist studying acupuncture fer cryin' out loud. (the various sorts were something of an in-joke amongst my mostly-computer-geek friends back in high school, so I learned them through osmosis)