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Subject:RE: Strange Interview Practices? From:"McDonald, Guy A." <Guy -dot- A -dot- McDonald -at- conoco -dot- com> To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Fri, 2 Nov 2001 14:32:53 -0600
Andrew Plato said ...
>One of the goals of any decent interview is to see
how people hold up under pressure.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Sort of, but not really. I think it more reasonable to say that an
individual who is so unstable that they would lose composure in an interview
has other problems.
There are plenty of people who can sail through a job interview but fail
around deadline time. Hell I even ran across a few guys who cruised through
2 years of naval nuclear power plant training and schools, made a few trips
underwater on a submarine and then went nutzoid after pressure got to a
certain point. In other words, all us peeples be different and have
different breakpoints. <<<<talk about the puns available in this post ---
wow!>>>>>
This whole discussion reminds me of a programmer who flew up to Austin for
an interview at Dell. The Dell folks screwed with him and made him wait for
over a half hour in a little room. This dude flipped and stomped off the
property with nothing good to say about Dell. Frankly, Dell did themselves a
favor by discovering how pompous this guy was before they extended an offer.
Or how 'bout the old story of Hyman Rickover who used to conduct personal
final interviews of the first US naval nuclear engineers? As this one goes,
an aspiring candidate decided to salt his food before tasting it. Rickover
failed the man because he would not trust a person who applies change to a
system before receiving qualitative evidence to justify the change.
For something as simple as technical writing though, it takes a fairly
fragile personality to misbehave under pressure. I think some on this list
just become annoyed when some fool in HR starts playing games.
To me, the worst kind of personality is the back-stabbing, petty-minded
losers who hide in large companies by kissing backsides. They get what they
deserve and eventually ...
- like their stock gets devalued,
- they are laid off
- or downsized to the point of having to work 16 hour days
while the rest of us work in a healthier and more lucrative place.
On the other hand, someone who blows up and has an occasional temper tantrum
or boo-hoos all over you when pressure is high might be salvageable.
Guy McDonald
Information Development Manager
Technical Information Architects, Inc. http://www.tiainfo.com
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