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Re:Technical Interviews at a Startup by tomblomfield on Saturday January 07, 2012 @03:36PM (#3438012)
I'm always wary of consultants - we've had some really bad experiences using recruitment consultants.

I absolutely agree that the main aim of an interview is to determine if a candidate is able to think in a structured and analytical way. I'm much more interested in talking about situations when you might choose UDP over TCP, rather than being able to recite the details of a particular HTTP specification

Re:Technical Interviews at a Startup by aen1 on Saturday January 07, 2012 @05:05PM (#3438186)
Sadly enough, I've been ask the UDP/TCP question many times, so I have a good answer, though I have never studied either in depth. So, in theory that would be a great question. But, it is asked too often to really be of any use.
Re:Technical Interviews at a Startup by xxqs on Saturday January 07, 2012 @05:11PM (#3438195)
actually a great interview question is what happens when you click a link in the browser. All the steps down to how deep you understand it: through the kernel calls, DNS packets, ARP, Ethernet frames, IP routing, TCP acknowledgements, HTTP headers, MIME types, and so on.
Re:Technical Interviews at a Startup by aen1 on Saturday January 07, 2012 @10:10PM (#3438758)
How is that good? It's all memorization
Re:Technical Interviews at a Startup by xxqs on Sunday January 08, 2012 @01:46AM (#3439045)
nope, this is all about understanding the logic and how the system components interact with each other.

Besides, you can dig deeper in any direction, depending on the candidate profile. For a network engineer, understanding on the packet level is important. For a web programmer, the interaction between server and client is important (HTTP headers, MIME types etc, webserver scalability etc.). For a sysadmin, understanding of processes and interaction of applications and OS is important. All those can be derived just from a simple question -- what happens when you click on a link

Re:Technical Interviews at a Startup by tomblomfield on Sunday January 08, 2012 @06:02AM (#3439312)
I agree - you can memorise answers on a fairly generic level, but digging deeper in a relevant area, or talking about edge cases, exposes whether a person really understands what's going on.
Re:Technical Interviews at a Startup by xxqs on Sunday January 08, 2012 @08:05AM (#3439464)
besides, how can one memorize if the questions are unknown?
Re:Technical Interviews at a Startup by xxqs on Saturday January 07, 2012 @03:58PM (#3438061)
I meant technology consultants, not really recruitment consultants :)

besides, you can silently participate in the interview, or review the sound recording afterwards.