In my last post I talked about interviewing and overrepresenting your knowledge. We had a similar situation with a different candidate and I'd like to talk about that a bit.
A typical interview question that I've used and had used on me goes something like "What blogs do you read regularly?". It's generally used as a conversation starter to see what you're interested in and how much you stay up on things. The candidate in question told us that he read "lots of blogs" but when pressed couldn't name a single one or even talk about a post he'd read recently. As with our other candidate, he could have probably redeemed himself but didn't.
You should be reading blogs. I'd suggest at least three or four with a mix of ruby/rails and general technology. thoughtbot is good along with Ruby News. and ruby source. Before any interview make sure that you've read one or two posts pretty in depth and be prepared to talk about it a bit.
If you have other suggestions for blogs to read or thoughts on interviewing (either side of the table), be sure to leave them in the comments.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
how about something even better... read BOOKS.
ReplyDeleteMarcel, thanks for your comment and I'm definitely for books and reading them. In fact, in addition to the above question, I've also used "What technical books have you read lately?". I think books and blogs serve two different purposes here in the technical world and both should be used.
ReplyDelete