Re: (Ovid) Re(2): Jaron Lanier is a Schmuck

[Albannach]

I'd guess that you were not hired for poise, and since you don't tell us how the swimsuit portion of the interview went (bragging eh?), the most probable reason for your hiring was a combination of:

• you appeared intelligent
• you admitted when you didn't know something
• you assessed the building stress and futility of the questioning, and dealt with it using a simple, humerous, and polite question that made everyone feel better about what they were doing there

IMHO, these are all features (or at least indications of them) you want to find in employees, but often don't. Yes plenty of people can stumble around and look the part, and that is precisely why an interviewer must use less tangible measures than test results to select people. In a previous company I was involved in staffing a software development group which was to do a major overhaul of a DOS-based scheduling system and move it into Win32 (all in C and assembly at the time). We built a test of basic C skills, but as I recall the results were not in any way related to the eventual hiring decisions.

If someone has the right personality they can learn what you need them to know. In many cases even the best programmers would need to learn a great deal in order to build an application in specific field about which they know nothing.

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I'd like to be able to assign to an luser