July 28, 1997

Well, I never.

I'm one of those people who is a gifted test-taker and a good job interview subject, and yet after a recent interview by a web consulting company who shall remain nameless, the interviewer came away with the opinion that I didn't know Perl. This is really horrifying to me, although Tino finds it really amusing. I know why he finds it funny - because I make a very good living by being a Perl programmer - and it doesn't upset me that he feels this way. He even had the benefit of hearing my replies to the questions, and he didn't hear me say anything stupid, so we we're both perplexed.

I'm over it now, because the recruiter dude actually believes me, but it was a horrible interview. I was extremely distressed almost immediately because she jumped right in and asked questions about things that I never claimed to know on any level but basic. She didn't just ask these questions directly. It took three tries for me to figure out what the HELL the first question was. This left me with the anxiety of feeling I'd answered incorrectly because I didn't understand what she wanted.

So anyway...

I got feedback from the recruiter guy, and based on his info, I know what happenned. After the first several questions that just confused me and made me nervous, I choked on a really simple question that I knew the answer to as soon as I hung up. The question was on http encoding and what happens to spaces when they are sent from a form via a url or a print location. At least I think that's what the question was. The answer is that they need to be plus signs or you'll lose the stuff after the first space. I said that I'd written a subroutine to deal with it and I had forgotten how it worked because my brain just stopped functioning at that inopportune moment. Yes, it's a simple question and one I should know right off, but based on this, she made a whole bunch of assumptions, apparently.

We went on to discuss programming style and the object oriented features of Perl. I explained that I tried to make things modular and use the old library-style functions of Perl. (This wasn't the best way to answer the question - I should have been more specific about version numbers and how my current employer uses Perl 4 for everything, but I was still clear about the facts). I said that I like to write subroutines that took @_ input and sent back results with the return function. She somehow made the assumption that I didn't actually write THOSE subroutines and that I was merely using routines written by others.

After the call, I had no idea what had just happenned. After I heard the 'feedback' from the recruiter, I was horrified. It's all ironed out now, and he wrote it off to her personality and a lack of understanding of the job that I was to be interviewed FOR. I suppose I'll be giving it another whirl with the new guy they assigned to do the technical interview. I truly wish these things weren't done on the phone.