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It depends on what your priorities are in hiring. Mine
have always been for people with "technical" backgrounds
in the subject matter, and as a result I have always set
up my dept templates so that a candidate whose background
is as a biologist, engineer, aircraft mechanic, etc. could
produce a usable document without having to spend a lot of
time tinkering "under the hood." My initial reaction to
your form of evaluating a candidate is that it'd be great
for hiring DTP or web design specialists, but would tend
to get you a writing dept full of those dreaded "font
fondlers."
As a candidate, I'd probably be toast in your interview,
because while I've got 20+ years of experience researching
and documenting complex technologies, I really haven't got
much knowlege about what Frame, Dreamweaver or the various
other SW tools I'm using are doing to the code underneath
their UIs. I'm not getting paid to tear them apart, they're
tools and I expect them to work according to their docs,
the same way my users expect my docs to tell them how to
get what they need from the products they describe without
requiring them to get "under the hood." I imagine that
the code underneath some of my docs looks pretty ugly.
Gene Kim-Eng
------- Original Message -------
On
Fri, 20 Jun 2003 13:45:36 -0600 ?wrote:
I'm about to start interviewing for a couple of positions. I'm curious
about the list's reactions to one aspect to how I want to conduct these
interviews.
I'm a bit of a "under the hood" kinda guy - sloppy or inefficient HTML,
manual formatting in Word, that sort of thing - drives me nuts. Therefore,
when I interview candidates, I'd like to see the code underneath the
writing samples they provide. I think this will help me estimate their
"technical" expertise <sp?> in the tools we use here.
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