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Thursday 08 January 2009

The N.W.R.A

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interviewing stories #1

Doug Burns tells of an unusual company with an unusual interviewing technique that reminded me of some interviewing anecdotes.

After one year in IT, I had money in my pocket, no more studies and I was keen, enthusiastic and motivated. Consequently, I was invited on the 'milk round' to interview prospective graduates in Scotland. Flying in an aeroplane, staying in a posh hotel, eating food, drinking beer and not having to pay for any of it motivated me even more.

So I painted a glowing picture of our company to everyone I met. Even people I wasn't interviewing like the hotel receptionist. I couldn't wait to tell the nervous undergraduates, in their ill fitting suits, about the summer barbecque with as much free food and alcohol as you could consume with transport laid on. Nor could I wait to tell them about the Christmas dinner dance at a top notch London hotel with partners invited, a high quality 5 course meal, cabaret, disco, and, again, as much free alcohol as you wanted.

A year later, I was pleasantly surprised to see a familiar Scottish face turn up for his induction after his successful application. He was also pleased, enthusiastic and motivated. Well he was. Until, two weeks later, I had to break the news that this years summer barbecque was cancelled due to 'budgetary constraints'. With the aid of counselling, he managed to get over that bombshell until, three months later, I had to break the tragic news that the Christmas dinner dance was also cancelled due to 'adverse market conditions and poor company performance in Q3/Q4'.

seldomly asked questions

People never ask me 'Just who is this Norman Brightside character ?' 'Norman Brightside' is an alias for a fictitious Oracle Database Administrator based in Solihull, near England. Norman briefly flirted with celebrity, last year, when he had the temerity to criticise Tom Kyte. Norman Brightside is also a bastardisation of Norman Whiteside, a Northern Irish footballer who played for Manchester United in the 80's and the song 'Mr. Brightside' by the popular American beat combo - The Killers.

I'm not paranoid

I just think everyone's out to get me.

Search Term: +"Norman Brightside"+"Blog"

Please, please don't let it be the BAA security staff from T4.

the innocence of youth

Sometimes, your offspring know more then you do. For example, my son is a wizard at dragging, resizing and cropping photographs in a Word document. This is a seemingly simple task but can quite literally take me hours and drive me to the edge of despair. Occasionally, however, you know more than your offspring. For example, my son had assembled a pile of CD's and was searching for copies of the same MP3 tracks on the Internet. I then showed him that it would be easier and quicker simply to insert the CD into the computer and click 'Import CD'.

high availability, resilient, non-stop, 7×24 computing

So Typepad had plans to implement resilient disk storage but had an outage before the work was complete, which meant that users lost access to their treasured blogs as a consequence. Elsewhere del.ico.us celebrated the Yahoo! takeover by having an outage that also meant that users lost access to their bookmarks. I also noticed that the transaction log on the database used by Newsgator filled up over the weekend and the forums were also unavailable this morning. My UK ISP appears to have suddenly been taken by surprise by a slight increase in users which has broken their email infrastructure causing sporadic access to email for a period close to seven days. Isn't anyone at Blueyonder responsible for capacity planning ?