[Courses] [Careers] My operations path

[Rasjid Wilcox]

On Monday 07 February 2005 15:58, Mary wrote:
> On Sat, Feb 05, 2005, Chix Career wrote:
> > I'm not as hands on with Operations as I was six months ago.  We
> > bought another company and I've moved into more of a Project and
> > person management role.  I still have my own projects to do, but have
> > someone else doing many of the day to day things I was doing.
> > Managing people is challenging - I've got one right now I'm on the
> > verge of firing, and it's really hard, especially since he's a
> > personable guy.  He's just a really crappy employee.
>
> Based on this experience (or others), do you have any tips on how to
> avoid people who have good interpersonal skills but lack the job skills?
> Or was this just too hard to tell at the time he was hired?

A bit of a late response, but anyway...

Having interviewed people on several occasions (although not really for 
programming positions), my suggestion is to always ask real hands-on 
questions, or ideally have a mini-assignment.

I've been on the interview panel for IT support/admin positions, and in my 
experience questions like "Are you familiar with detecting and removing 
viruses?" are pretty useless.

Better is: "Assume you start work here tomorrow.  You are checking the 
firewall logs and see unexpected attempts to send outgoing data on port 25 
from PC 124.  What do you do?"

Have a tricky scenario in mind.  If they suggest scaning the PC for viruses, 
say they find none.  What would they think of doing next?  You can tell a lot 
more about what someone knows when asking somewhat open-ended questions that 
mean that they need to think on the spot, rather than just get them to list 
what tasks they have done.

In a similar vein, an example of what one company did for its programming 
recuitment is given at http://i4031.net/article/2003/08/badcode.pH.
(Actually, I'm sure I got this link from a LinuxChix list a few months ago...)

Anyway, I hope this is of some help.

Cheers,

Rasjid.

-- 
Rasjid Wilcox
Melbourne, Australia (UTC +11 hrs)
http://www.openminddev.net