Conquering the technical interview

by Bob Weinstein

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April 26, 2001, 02:44 PM — ITworld.com —

"How to interview" books are almost as plentiful as "how to write a résumé" books. Most of the advice is generic, laden with tired platitudes and not worth the money. One book that breaks the mold is Ace the Technical Interview by Michael Rothstein (McGraw-Hill, $21.95). The subhead reads, "How to Get the Best Job in the Computer Industry," and "2000 Answers to Tough Questions."

The 493-page book is packed with solid information written by someone with more than 30 years of data processing experience and is targeted at the folks in the IT trenches. Rothstein began his career at Univac and has worked for Big Blue, Motorola, and Bankers Trust as a systems engineer.

Rothstein wrote the first chapter which is an overview of the technical interview that tells you what you need to know to succeed. The remainder of the book was written by experts, senior programmers, technical managers, and consultants.

In a nutshell, the book contains everything you need to know to ace the technical interview. The message is obvious and powerful. Interviews are job auditions. Like the actor preparing for a part, the more you put into the critical preparation phase, the better your chance of scoring a role. The harsh reality is if you mess up the interview, you don't get another chance. There are no callbacks on the career stage.

Beyond good advice, such as tips for managing uncomfortable situations, you'll learn how interviewers think and what kind of person companies are looking for. In "Interviewing Frameworks," Barry Glasgow, a technical manager, explains that interviews are not just a matter of delivering great answers and getting a job. "To facilitate hiring, many managers organize the informational needs of the interview into frameworks or categories of informational needs to efficiently organize, analyze, and collect data so that a hire/no hire decision can be made," Glasgow explains.

Glasgow uses three information frameworks: The Input-Analysis-Output (IAO) model, Evidence-Analysis (EA) procedure, and the Job Employee-Employer (JEE) model.

Complicated? You bet it is. IAO looks at your résumé, physical appearance, answers, references and appraisal of job skills, technical competency, work ethic, and more. EA verifies and validates your information and JEE assesses the particular requirements of the position.

Chapter 4 of the book covers practical tips about how employment agencies can be valuable in your job search. In a job market where "headhunters," or executive search firms, are getting all the press I found it refreshing to confirm what I always knew: The traditional employment agency still can be valuable in your job search. Ideally, you ought to be harnessing all the forces at your disposal -- headhunters, employment agencies, and anyone who can point you to a job. The best reason for using an employment agency, says Michael Sichel, is that "employment agencies have contacts." Needless to say, a great contact could be priceless.

Then the book gets technical. Subsequent chapters deal with the history and importance of MVS, followed by a comprehensive chapter on Unix by Val Caricu, a Unix system and Informix database administrator. It starts with a brief history of the Unix system, explaining its space travel game roots developed by Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie at the beginning of the 1970s. It also lists more than 100 questions you had better be able to answer if you hope to conquer a job working with a Unix system.

Let's see how good you are. Question: How can you make sure that the work file created during the execution of a script will be removed even if the script was interrupted? Answer: Within a shell script you can still take action (in this case remove files) when an interrupt signal is received by using the trap command. An example of a trap command would be: trap 'rm -f tempfile;exit' 0 2 3 15. How did you do?

There are chapters on the AS/400 Advanced Series; OS/2 Release 3.0; VM -- the IBM Virtual Machine Operating System; the RS/6000; and Oracle Release 7.3. By Chapter 18, the material covers Client/Server Systems Architectures; Networks and Network Administration; Object-Oriented Analysis; Delphi; Visual Basic and more.

This book is no page-turner, but the information it conveys is important. I urge you to spend time reviewing the questions following each chapter. They're critical for determining whether you know enough to impress an interviewer. If you can rock through them, I guarantee you'll walk out of a tough interview with a smile on your face.

Standard interviews are tough enough. Thanks to psychologists who are determined to make our lives tougher, techies must now cope with the behavioral interview. Here are the subtle ins and outs for scoring well.

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