On Sunday 24 Apr 2011 21:01:57 Shawn H Corey wrote:
> On 11-04-24 10:36 AM, Akhthar Parvez K wrote:
> > Well, what I actually meant was not diverting it baselessly. One could
> > actually start with "I don't think I actually know what you asked, but
> > if<now_divert_to_something_relevant_you_know>". It's just to let the
> > interviewer know that you know about something related eventhough you
> > don't know the answer for the exact question. It's anything but an
> > attempt to fool.:-) After all, what the interviewer wants to know is if
> > the interviewee is knowledgable enough and it's not always necessary to
> > have that happened by an answer he expected.
>
> I still think I have to disagree. Sometimes interviewers ask purposely
> obscure questions not to see if you know the answer but to see what
> you'd do if you came across a problem you couldn't immediately solve
> when on the job. The best response is to state you don't know and then
> tell what you'd do:
>
> 1. Inform your immediate supervisor about the problem.
>
> 2. Start searching the company's code base and asking the old hands
> about it.
>
> 3. Search the web.
>
> 4. Ask the perlmonks <http://perlmonks.org/>
>
> 5. (Anything you can think of.)
I recall a job for a security company that developed an Intrusion detection
system (IDS) or Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) - don't remember which one -
as a small embedded box running vxWorks [vxWorks] and they asked me "How would
you design an IDS?" I told them that I didn't know and they told me "We'll
help you. Do you have any ideas?" I had some leads, but I ended up saying I
don't know, and couldn't really get anywhere. Maybe they were looking for
brighter or more experienced people then me, but I naturally didn't get the
job, nor was I very impressed of their hiring and interviewing philosophy.
Most good workplaces I've been to asked me to write a piece of code (a bit
tricky, but not very time consuming) in their language of choice or less often
"my favourite language", and I do better there because I'm a capable coder,
and I think it's a good idea to actually instruct the candidate to write some
code.
------
On a different note, another good idea is to not be too prepared. One of my
online friends was offered to interview for Google, and he got prepared with
studying a lot of deep and formal data structures and algortihms theory ("you
need to know how to implement a QuickSort off-hand.") and when he came there,
his technical questions were much less sophisticated than he thought they
would. Some employers may view such a thing as a red flag, because a person is
trying to seem to be more than he is by "cramming" for an interview. They
usually don't expect you to be a software development
superstar/virtuoso/rocket-scientist , and you should know better to assume
they do (and if they do, you probably won't get the job by cramming.).
Regards,
-- Shlomi Fish
[vxWorks] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VxWorks - an embedded operating
system by a company that was often referred to as "The Microsoft of the
Embedded market", mostly POSIX compatible, but very different from most
mainstream UNIX, a bit quirky, using a very old version of the GNU tools for
development. Lost some popularity and hype in the embedded space due to
competition from Linux, Embedded MS-Windows, the BSDs and similar solutions,
but is still popular. I was told it's not really comparable to Linux, and they
both have different use-cases.
--
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