Also stop with: interviewing based on rote memorization.
Yesterday I had a really crappy (third-party!) phone screen assessing my ASP.NET and some general web dev knowledge. Questions included asking me what the stages are in the ASP.NET page life cycle, how to create Web Control in ASP.NET, what elements are new in HTML5, and how to pop up a new window in Javascript.
None of which I know off the top of my head (except I know <canvas> is new), each of which I can learn in about 100 milliseconds, and none of which assess skill and intellect.
Did you want a skilled programmer, or someone who memorized their Foobar Enterprise Framework cheat sheet? Because you're only interviewing for one of those.
> Did you want a skilled programmer, or someone who memorized their Foobar Enterprise Framework cheat sheet? Because you're only interviewing for one of those.
People who ask common/simple insert language/framework here interview questions are sometimes looking to see if you at least minimum care enough to memorize the answers. Alternatively a sideways answer might work, like "I find that's no longer necessary since..." or "I'll be attending a 3-day dev conference that includes that topic..."
That said, it makes it look like they don't care enough about interviewees, when they put so little effort into the questions asked. To hire a skilled programmer, you need to present yourself as a skilled interviewer.
Ugh. See, and if my mom asked that, I know she's looking for a barebones high-level explanation that she can grok, so I can be a bit fuzzy. But when an interviewer asks me that? I can't tell if they're just screening out the dummies, or if they actually want me to talk about packets and handshakes and DNS protocol.
Yesterday I had a really crappy (third-party!) phone screen assessing my ASP.NET and some general web dev knowledge. Questions included asking me what the stages are in the ASP.NET page life cycle, how to create Web Control in ASP.NET, what elements are new in HTML5, and how to pop up a new window in Javascript.
None of which I know off the top of my head (except I know <canvas> is new), each of which I can learn in about 100 milliseconds, and none of which assess skill and intellect.
Did you want a skilled programmer, or someone who memorized their Foobar Enterprise Framework cheat sheet? Because you're only interviewing for one of those.