Mike Coyle’s Weblog

Joel Spolsky has a great article on The Phone Screen, prompting me to jot down my $.02 on the topic.

In a prior life, I used to do tons of technical phone screens for everything from C# developers to Linux sysadmins. There is one concept that drives my interviewing style: You never have to ask a Navy SEAL if they can swim.

Here’s why: There are many skills, experiences, etc. that intrinsically require mastery (or at least competency) in smaller supporting skills. I’ve found that if I can validate these higher-level skills, I can reasonably assert that the candidate is competent in a cascade of supporting topics. It also allows you to sidestep the Buzzword Bingo that so many candidates feel that they need to play.

I like to ask questions that intrinsically flush out other areas of expertise (or lack thereof) in the process of being answered. For example, I never ask someone if they are proficient in [INSERT TOPIC HERE].

Rather, I ask them what they like or dislike about it, and why. If they have an opinion regarding likes and dislikes, it’s usually grounded in an understanding of the topic at hand, plus some basis for making the comparison. Plus, I’ve found that canned answers regarding opinions are easier to sniff out, because there’s no heart behind them.

The folks that eat and breathe technology have lukewarm opinions either way on very few topics.

I also ask a lot of questions about failures, bad designs, etc. I’ve found that for every big project, there are a bunch of junior folks who wait two years and then profess to be the project lead. The imposters always remember the cool stuff and the brag-worthy statistics (”we saved the customer $30M…”). However, only the genuine project leads can speak convincingly about the all-night debugging session in the office with the CIO the day before the big demo, the nasty integration details, hard-to-reproduce library conflicts, etc.

Also, here’s one more tip: I’ve found that if a candidate ever answers a question with word “Polymorphism”, they are always trying to bluff their way through the interview using big words. I know this because I never ask questions where the word “Polymorphism” by itself is a reasonable answer.

If you haven’t seen it yet, the latest update to Mac OS X (10.4.8) includes a new feature where ctrl-mousewheel provides a full-screen zoom. It’s amazing (at least to me) how cleanly the render quality degrades as the zoom level increases. Things get blurry, but they don’t get blocky and pixelated. Thanks again, Quartz.

I think that the scroll zoom will be very much like Preview.app. It’s not the kind of feature that makes one stop what they’re doing and run out to buy a Mac, but you really miss it when working on other platforms. With a Mac, things Just Work (cough, most of the time).

Case in point, a few hours ago, I had to enter in a 15 digit number on a computer that was 10 feet away from my MacBook where I had the number up on the screen. I simply wheel-zoomed to the point where I could read it from far away, and zoomed back when I was done.

No harm, no foul. No thought involved.

But wait, you could do that with Windows/Linux/TRS-80/etc. simply by [INSERT 3 STEP PROCESS HERE]. But I firmly believe that the best technology is the stuff that you don’t notice.

Now I’m sure that there is some 19 year old rock star developer in Western Elbonia implementing that same wheel-zoom functionality in Linux (assuming it isn’t already implemented), to be folded into Ubuntu three scheduled releases from now (ditto).

The thing that’s great about the Mac is that the features a) Work Now, and b) Work Together. That is worth spending a few extra clams to me when I buy a new computer every couple of years.

But lest my advocacy be misinterpreted as elitism, believe me, when I first noticed that scroll-zoom (or any other wicked cool OS X benefit), I didn’t settle down into my best Thurston Howell the 3rd voice and ponder aloud about how the other half could possibly live.

The last thing we want as users, particularly those of us working with multiple platforms, is to have Daffy Duck jumping on Tux the Penguin’s head saying “Down, down, down. Mine, mine, mine.” Rather, the cross-proliferation of features across the Mac/Linux/Windows worlds may be bad for platform zealots, but it’s great for the rest of us.

That being said, OS X is probably the best end user experience “right now”, for most values of “right now”. Isn’t that true, Lovey?