I doubt it's sarcasm. I've often lamented that as a 30-year 'veteran' I'm still often treated as though I'm probably incompetent, until proven otherwise beyond a reasonable doubt. Some people do ignore my CV. I know that some people believe this is right and necessary because you can't trust anyone. I believe it's a travesty in this industry, and if I am treated this way, I'm walking straight out the door and into my next opportunity.
How do you interview someone more experienced than yourself?
In the last set of interviews I had to do, I've ended up doing the role of talking to people about the technologies listed on their CV and asking them detailed questions to find out just how well they really know them. This just because I happened to be the person in our company who knew a little bit about most of the things that the people we were interviewing claimed to be good at.
Sometimes you have a really nice technical conversation with them and discover that they're clever and knowledgable. Sometimes you uncover a blagger trying their luck. Sometimes a bit of both. So, it's a useful part of the interview I think.
So very recently we interviewed someone with 30+ years of experience, more than any programmer at our company (only 3 developers), and much more than myself (8 years).
So I went away and did a little bit of research about the technologies he'd talked about: COM and Corba and JBoss and other artefacts 80s and 90s, and tried to ask some questions in as respectful a way as I good, and I hope he wasn't too annoyed. In the end he was great (actually I found his enthusiasm and attention to detail pretty inspiring) and we hired him.
I can definitely see how a person would be annoyed by that sort of probing though, especially when the interviewer doesn't know what they're talking about.
The alternative is for our field to have a strong organization that vets it's members, like any other professional field such as lawyers and other engineering disciplines. That way, before you even meet the person, you can assume a level of competence and can get into much deeper questions faster.
I guess the irony is that most of the interview tactics now focus simply on comparing candidate A to candidate B, in contrast to learning about candidate A or learning about candidate B and evaluating their suitability based on their skills and experience.
If you ask both candidates a question like "Johnny climbed up to the top of the hill, where was Johnny when he stopped climbing?" and then get a blank stare from both candidates then you are going to conclude that you can't find any 'qualified' candidates because they can't answer a dead-simple question.
The vetting of candidates used to be contributions to software product releases and publications (in addition to degrees and GPA). A motivated hiring manager could also search mail archives of popular open-source projects.
And then all the high-paying jobs will go to people who went to MIT and Stanford, and if you're great but couldn't afford more than community college, tough luck, because your credential is the same as other people who barely finished high school.
It doesn't sound to me like you did anything wrong. I think what I have in mind is more subtle than just asking questions. I don't have any objection to being asked questions in general. I would prefer you ask questions appropriate to the claims I'm making about myself - that is, I'll feel more insulted if you ask more than a couple of remedial questions. You may suspect I'm a fraud, but beware of communicating to me that you suspect I'm a fraud.
> I've often lamented that as a 30-year 'veteran' I'm still often treated as though I'm probably incompetent, until proven otherwise beyond a reasonable doubt.
I have had a pleasure of interviewing a 'veteran' who listed both Emacs and vim on his resume, among dozens of other keywords and many, many years of professional experience. I asked him, how do you exit these text editors? "As any other program", he answered, perplexed - "you click on the cross in the upper-right corner".
This was not an unique and ever especially outstanding event in my interviewing experience.
That you believe you can judge any developer by how they use their text editor is one of the most pitiful things I've heard on this topic yet. Every time I begin a new job, I pray I'm spared crossing paths with people who think like this.
I certainly can judge them for lying on their CV. As I explained in another thread, from my further conversation with him, this developer obviously had no clue about either of these text editors and clearly included them in his CV just as random keywords.
When I asked if he was using a console version or some wrapper that supported window manager, he didn't understand the question. When I asked if there's some another way to close it, he, just as surprised, told about the main program menu, just below the window title.
Any person who actually used either of these editors even once would have a pretty solid idea of what I was going for. It was a very simple, quick test to determine that he just assembled his CV from semi-relevant keywords at random.
I don't know if I believe that. Lots of people (in particular folks using Windows or Mac) use the GUI version of those editors because they're preinstalled on machines at school and work. They may not even know there is a console version of those programs. (Also "window manager" is pretty *nix-specific jargon.)
I get that someone might use the default text editor. But where would a vim/emacs variant be installed that way? And if it were, why would it last for a novice any longer than "um, this is weird and doesn't do anything". Vim and emacs are only tolerable if you put the effort to learn how they work. And if you did, how would you get to the end of a tutorial without learning how to quit?
You're right, it's technically possible, but the parent is justified in being really suspicious that someone is citing familiarity with both emacs and vim and is confused that there's a non-mouse way to do something.
Graphical Emacs/VIM were installed on the CS lab machines when I was in college. I’m pretty sure they were part of the default programming environment setup at my first workplace. GUI versions of these apps behave a lot like regular Windows or Mac apps. You can save with CTRL-S, etc. I can totally see how someone could be very experienced in using it and never know there is a keyboard shortcut to quit apart from the ‘x’ on the title bar.
The question would have been better if it was directed to an Emacs feature for which graphical versions didn’t obey ordinary Windows conventions.
The whole point of vim and emacs is that you can do everything from the keyboard and not have to switch your hands to/from it. Fancier versions (like Macvim, which I use) support the same basic premise.
Now, certainly, with the fancier GUIs you can absolutely use mouse inputs. But it's quite a bizarre scenario where someone would be using an interface narrowly optimized to use the keyboard for everything, and yet still consistently use the mouse to exit "like every other application". The reason you use emacs/vim is to keep your hands from having to leave the keyboard! Why would you do that and yet not use the standard command for quitting? Not even ctrl/cmd-Q?
The parent is right to be suspicious of someone claiming extensive emacs/vim experience while using the mouse as a default option for a frequent, required command.
FWIW: I'm a Macvim user that has never quit it by clicking an X even though I know it's possible (at least for the individual windows). Although also FWIW I don't use the vim window feature and would fail questions about that.
