As a long overdue follow-up to my interview tips article from 2006 (yes, I said it was an overdue follow-up, heh) I'm going to address some of the most common points and questions that have come up since then. Some of these are based on comments I've made elsewhere but I'm dragging it all together in one place now.
I don't believe in 'get the job at any cost'
That's why I don't make lists of magic phrases to use in interviews, or things like that. My approach is more about finding the right job for you,
which is why I don't suggest you over-think too much on what to say or do in the
interview; if being yourself isn't the right thing to do, or so near it
doesn't matter, then are you really going to be happy taking that job?
Of course, there is something to be said for getting a job at any cost
if you're out of work and really need a job! But then what you consider to
be an acceptable job is going to be very
different to what is acceptable to someone who is essentially happy but
just wants to see if they could do better elsewhere. If you do find yourself in this situation then I believe that being in employment makes it easier to find employment. The pure mechanics of scheduling interviews is obviously a problem but employed candidates seem to be more attractive to prospective employers than unemployed candidates.
Focus on the basics. Get these right and everything else will follow.
The reason I keep repeating this idea to focus on the basics is because that is where I see people going wrong time and time again.
I mentioned turning up on time in the first post because it's something I see candidates
fail to do all the time, not just because it is a nice safe place to
start. This is fundamental and I can't believe I still have to mention it. I'm not talking about being the victim of an unforeseen disaster. Sometimes stuff just happens, and if it causes you to lose an interview opportunity then there isn't much you can do about it, but you should never arrive late because of something you could have anticipated beforehand.
I mention behaving properly because - and I still can't believe this - I took part in interviews with a 'Paper MCSE'
for an entry level position we had a few years ago. This would have
been their first IT job after working in another industry sector and
deciding to change career paths. That wasn't the problem. In fact, we (the interviewers) were quite interested in talking to this candidate and hoped that their wider experience would not only make up for their lack of specific industry experience but would perhaps help them bring a new approach to the role we were advertising.
The problem was that he was shouting and screaming at me because I had
dared to design our AD setup in a different manner from what his "Learn
MCSE AD Design in 24 hours" book suggested.
He didn't want to hear
that we might have valid reasons for our design. He didn't want to hear
that my knowledge and experience were probably on a par with that of the
author (who I actually know!), and certainly was far in excess of his. He didn't want to hear that we had validated our design with a number of people (including a major IT contractor to the education industry and the author of the book he was using as his reference). He just wanted to shout
and scream because we dared to be different to his book.
So do you think we made him an offer?
Be polite to everyone you speak to, no matter who they are. If someone offers you help (directions around the building, a drink, etc) be graceful in how you respond to them no matter whether or not you need their help. Let me make this quite clear: Every single person you speak to while you are on the site will probably be asked for their opinion of you before an offer is made. Even if their opinion isn't asked for, you can be damn sure they'll make sure that the interviewing manager will hear about it if you are rude to anyone at any time for any reason.
You've got to be comfortable speaking about yourself to sell yourself to the interviewer.
This is was something I found very difficult myself when I was younger.
All I can say is practice, practice practice. Get used to speaking on
any subject you know about. The more you practice speaking in general
the better at it you get.
And you're always going to be the subject
matter expert for your own career.
Be a human. Humans have limits.
If you get asked a question, in particular a technical question that is being used to gauge your knowledge, it's better to admit you don't know than to bluff or stare blankly at the interviewer waiting to be rescued.
If something is on your resume then you should be prepared to answer questions on it. If you get caught out with questions about something on your resume that you have no clue how to answer then I refer you to the part in my earlier article about not lying. Sorry.
If you're being asked about something you don't know the answer to and can't reasonably be expected to know the answer to then the interviewer is probably trying to guage both the limits of your knowledge and how you react to being pushed to your limits. There is nothing wrong with not knowing something, especially if it isn't something you could reasonably be expected to know. Admit it, and try to answer the question as best you can, if possible, or at the very least show that you might be prepared to guess or that you know how you might begin to find an answer.
So with great fanfare*cough*, Microsoft have announced the next version of their web browser, which will be Internet Explorer 8. Didn't see that one coming! Dean Hachamovitch, manager of the IE team, has some fun with 'alternative' names in the IE Team blog post I've linked to above, and asked us not to "mistake silence for inaction".
You've got a point Dean, but perhaps you might try looking at it from our point of view. You know, how customers see things? You remember customers, don't you Dean? Those people who used to use IE but now use FireFox, Opera or Safari? You know, those browsers whose developers appear to be actually doing things and haven't kept so silent that they haven't had to chide anyone for thinking that they're hiding.
Gosh, when your own CEO appears to be unsure what you're doing these days, it seems to me you ought to cut your customers a little slack. But that's just my opinion, I'd love to hear yours. Kudos to Molly Holzschlag for asking the questions and posting the answers by the way!
Thing is though, I think Microsoft have a few problems here. First of all, I thought we were supposed to see a shorter development cycle post IE7, and that certainly doesn't appear to be happening. A lot has happened in the browser market since IE7 was released, FireFox 3 has test versions out, Opera keeps quietly sitting in the corner getting better and better all the time and.. oh yeah... there's this new browser appeared for the Windows platform that is based on some very interesting technologies. still, I'm sure that's not a problem, it isn't as if it's supported by one of the other major IT companies... oh wait... it is.
Jeff Attwood said it very well in his recent post on IE, pointing out that given the length of time between IE6 and IE7, us Microsoft customers deserve better than that. We don't deserve silence, we deserve some kind of proper feedback on what is going on here.
Also, I think we deserve some innovation. I've seen some suggestions around the place that Microsoft can't innovate any more (indeed, plenty of people claim they never could in the first place). I'm not sure I agree; Microsoft can innovate as well as most of their competitors at least in some areas and at some times. XBox 360 was quite an innovative hardware design, for example.
IE4 was quite innovative in its day. Some of its ideas didn't take off too well at the time but look at Widgets / Gadgets now and tell me that isn't inspired by (among other things sure) IE4's Active Desktop.
Staying with IE, the whole damn problem with that and Netscape navigator was that back in the IE3 / IE4 Netscape 4.x days was that each company innovated a little too much by trying to extend HTML in their own directions instead of sticking closely to the standards.
Of course, innovation is all well and good but all these companies are measured by the money they make, not the innovation they display. Putting a bit of meat and some salad between two bars of soap might arguably be called innovation in the field of sandwich making, but no one is going to want to eat the results, which just goes to show you that being obsessed with "innovation" at the expense of making what people want isn't a good thing either.
So what am I hoping to see in a new IE8?
Update - Since writing this article I have found the great set of pages on IE7 interface problems at Project Cerbera, pretty much all the issues mentioned there are on my fix-list too now I've been reminded of them!
I think it might be time for a ground-up rewrite of the internal engine.
Yes I know that's going to hurt, but that pain is something Microsoft will have to deal with sooner or later - the longer you keep deferring major work you know needs to be done the more the work will cost in the end, like leaving a minor dental problem until it effects your whole gumline or failing to take care of a minor problem with your car and allowing a major one to develop in its place (I must phone the garage tomorrow...).
I want to see better tools for deploying IE to multiple workstations and managing it afterwards.
The one area where IE scores a big win is on corporate desktops, where it's installed by default and Microsoft's ability to allow things like IE to be managed via things like Group Policies is a big win. One bad side of this corporate thing is that you often need special tools (Internet Explorer Administrative Kit or IEAK) to build a version of IE to upgrade corporate desktops. I can see where this might be useful for special deployments but why can't I just allocate IE 7 easily via a standard MSI and configure it all in situ via GPOs? Would be nice if all parts of Microsoft could actually follow their own installer guidelines!
It should run on XP as well as Vista.
Leaving aside my opinion of Vista and the rights and wrongs of that, a lot of people out there have not upgraded yet and don't appear to have many plans to upgrade soon. These people should not be forced to upgrade their whole OS just to upgrade the browser.
There is (as always with me) a security side to this; it seems a given that any new Microsoft app will concentrate on security (or at least Microsoft's version of security). If there are lots of older versions of Windows out there running out of date and insecure browsers, these can easily become infected and may prove very difficult to clean up and keep clean reliably.
It needs to concentrate hard on meeting the various standards for webpage rendering.
There's a certain amount of work that has gone into all the other browser engines out there which Microsoft's IE has missed during it's long hibernation after IE6. I realise it's a lot of hard work for Microsoft to regain this lost ground, but you folks up there in Redmond only have yourselves to blame for that. And I remember the comments coming from your team around the IE7 release about how the ACID tests were not really that important and it was no biggie that you didn't do too well on them; well even if that might be true on a practical day-to-day basis, don't underestimate the PR problems that come from doing so badly in those tests!
The interface sucks. I'm sorry but it does. Let's have something that looks like a Windows app next time!
Note to whoever signed off on the IE7 interface layout:I realise your
primary school child is very special and talented but please don't let
them design any more user interfaces for major software releases until
they've at least graduated high school (actually maybe I've found the
reason for the IE8 delay?)
I know that some people like the new interface. That's great, but
please let us choose between the new layout and something more
"standard". It's illogical, it doesn't really fit in with your own guidelines and even on it's own merits it has some faults (e.g. the stop button always working even when there's nothing to 'stop').
When I first talked about Safari, my good friend Lewis Burgess posted a comment that I totally agreed with then and still do that one of the biggest faults with Safari for Windows is that it looks and behaves like a Mac application. Now Lewis is as keen on OS X as I am, so neither one of us was hating on Apple, but I do like my Mac applications to look and feel like Mac applications and my Windows applications to look and feel like Windows applications. Safari for Windows breaks that rule, but in Apple's defence they can point to IE7 and say "Well Microsoft started it". This is not a good position for either 'side' to be in!
Buy a damn atlas! (or attention to the little things makes a big difference)
Newsflash: America is not the whole world. I know it's a very small thing but attention to these small details is often the very reason why some products do so well and others do not. With that in mind, is it really too much to ask you to take note of the regional settings for the rest of my computer and set the browser to use those instead of trying to 'trick' me into picking US English during your first run setup process? (When I see mistakes like this I wonder if it shows for people of all languages or just if you use any of the 'non-American English' choices)
I'm picking on this because it's a symptom of everything that is wrong with IE7. There are a myriad of little issues that could have been resolved by checking a setting and just following what was already there, or by just picking a sensible default and making the controls to change it reasonably easy to find.