Some time ago I read this post, “I will not do your tech interview“. It’s an awesome commentary and I agree with it wholeheartedly. As a consultant, I have to do a lot of interviews, and many times it’s hard to know a lot about the company who is going to interview me, or their corporate culture, or what to expect, ahead of time. Hence, for me interviews are a two-way street – I am as much interviewing my potential client, as they are interviewing me. Today I had a particularly hilarious interview. The interviewers started off the interview by telling me their names and then proceeding to read from a grocery list of academic text-book questions. That alone made me do a double take, even though I had been warned this would be a ‘technical interview’. What, you don’t want know jack about me? How are going to know if I’m pleasant to work with, or what my personality is like? If those things don’t matter to you, what kind of insane work environment do you guys have?
At the end of the interview, which was for a Flex project, I asked them, ‘so, are you guys using the latest Apache Flex build, or what version are you using?’. One of the guys proceeded to give me another grocery list – this time of all the technologies they are using, from Ruby, to MySQL. Hm. Let’s try that again. ‘WHAT VERSION OF FLEX ARE YOU ACTUALLY USING?’
He said, ‘oh we’re using the old (Adobe) one, because Apache Flex doesn’t support AIR’.
WOW. Can you spell M-O-R-O-N? Never mind, that Apache Flex has always supported AIR from day one, and that if it didn’t it would be like Microsoft not supporting Windows anymore. Any monkey who bothered to even visit the Apache Flex web site would realize that. So, what you’re telling me, is that at your company, where you’re building ‘enterprise level’ projects in Flex, nobody in your team has bothered to keep up with the current state of affairs of Flex itself, and you’ve made serious architectural decisions regarding your software based on some ridiculous assumptions? Yeah, sign me up right away…NOT.