Job fairs == waste of time

One of the questions i was asked in the interview recently was what are your three strong points and your single weakest point. The answer was not to find out how good or bad you are but more so to test your confidence in responding to the question itself

I'd rather work with a dim bulb who knows exactly what he or she can and cannot do than a genius who thinks he's God.

People who know their limitations may not get the job done as quickly, but they won't pour truck loads of other people's money down the rat hole, either.

Of course, modest geniuses who _do_ know what they can do, who know when to go along and when to stick to their guns -- those people are worth their weight in darn near any substance you can name.

My weakest point is that I get flippant with interviewers who try to play head games with me.

:-)

It depends. It often takes more to explain how to get it right to a blockhead, rather then to do it yourself.

I didn't meet any of this kind. But I met quite many of the so-called engineers who never went to a library to read a book.

The right judgment comes with the experience. Only the one who never tried did never failed. Besides, the faulty technology is the rarest cause of the failure of the project.

Somehow it happens that the people of this sort are usially hiring, not getting hired.

Vladimir Vassilevsky

DSP and Mixed Signal Design Consultant

I always thought you would interview the client, not the other way around :-)

martin

Well said. Tim, you are one of the few who's philosophy is not the philosophy of a slave.

Vladimir Vassilevsky

DSP and Mixed Signal Design Consultant

I don't see the problem here. The interviewer (usually) has to actually work with the person he recruits. It' for him to decide upon the best way of getting the type of personality that he feels happy with.

tim

I actually worked with someone who was really, really, really good, and he knew it. He wasn't impossible to work with at all. He was really reasonable working with people who weren't as good as him (everybody).

Though, he did have an issue with the manager continually giving him numpty jobs to do.

tim

If that's the case that's fine but you'd better be able to back it up, and in any case I think he preferred a limitation in there (_what_ are you good at?). What he was trying to filter out was the straight-from-college, think they know it all types. Or the people who haven't learned anything about the real world and real systems since then. University courses are usually hopelessly abstract and it's easy to forget you don't know the ins and outs of _anything_ upon graduation. After that you lose the all-round perspective in favour of what you need for any given position.

If someone's performance is higher then the performance of 80% people at the same position, it obviously means this position is too low for this guy, and he is only wasting his time there.

If one is an employee, it does not pay off for him to be a superman. To the contrary, it only creates problems and tension. The person of this kind should either go on his own, or find some other direction to apply his eagerness.

Vladimir Vassilevsky

DSP and Mixed Signal Design Consultant

And God Forbid he might actually ENJOY what he is doing, and excelling at it. Can't have that.

Yes, because we all know that skilled, motivated workers are a threat to the rest of us lazy incompetents.

--Gene

No problem here. If someone seems to enjoy what he is doing, he should pay for that rather then get payed :)

Exactly. It can be called "union house" or "working as a team", however it basically means the same thing.

Vladimir Vassilevsky

DSP and Mixed Signal Design Consultant