_joe

Interviewing is hard. Both for the candidate and the interviewer, if he/she knows the value of hiring - as assessing the overall qualities of a candidate in a one-hour chat is mostly impossible. Also, you're interviewing someone whose future life depends on the outcome of that exam, to some extent. That makes a fraction of the people you interview very nervous and thus perform badly. Then, you have the introverts, and people that don't have great communication skills, who usually get the interviewer in a bad mood because the conversation gets uneasy. It's really a minefield not to create a huge amount of false negatives. So, I agree that uber-specific CS questions would just test your memory, or more precisely your luck. That's the same as "cultural fit", only in terms of technology.

My strategy, when interviewing is: - If the candidate has some FLOSS project he mentions in his resume (we actively encourage them to do so), I take a look at his/her code. That is usually one of the best indicators of their abilities. If the project is interesting, I usually start the interview from it. - Ask general questions which a candidate for this position should reasonably know. Try to get the candidate to talk to you, and then try to get the conversation to a more detailed level, to test how deep the knowledge of the field has gone - Ask the candidate to talk to you about something they have passion about in the tech field, a project they loved to work on. Again, use things the candidate is describing to get to dig a little deeper - Look at the CV, find any language that the candidate affirms to know well and to use daily, and ask some specifics about it. - Finally, make a small thought experiment of building an application.

These are normally questions that should not weed out anyone because they don't remember that particular detailed thing I love so much, and still weeds out very quickly whoever is superficial, or is pretending to know things he/se doesn't know.

You'd be amazed how many "rockstar web developers" fill their mouths with "RESTful webservices" and then have no idea of which the HTTP caching headers are. Or what's the HTTP status code for Not Modified. Or by how many python "hackers" can't tell the difference between a list and a set in their favourite language.

So, I definitely try to make the candidate be in a comfortable place during the interview. I know of at least one guy that told our internal recruiter that I use the interviews to show off... and that was because I explained a senior Java programmer that yes, Java's GC system is a bit different than Perl's.

So be advised, sometimes people are just bitter with the interviewer because they performed badly and can't admit that to themselves.

I have personally been discarded from a startup without even a phone interview, because of "not being a cultural fit to the company". What makes it more absurd (if possible, how do you determine "cultural fit" from a CV?) is that the position was remote. What makes it even more absurd is that the company actively used a software I wrote.

I deduced that "cultural fit" translated to the fact I was over 35.

Exactly. An accurate title would've been "Datastax kills Titan, author asks for the community to step up".

Titan was (design-wise) by far the most promising FLOSS graph database around, it's really sad to see it going away.

... just because I have that saved to use on IRC or anywhere else (like twitter) where a very long url would be inconvenient.

(I should've put a disclaimer there: I am one of the WMF engineers involved in the project).

The win is _also_ about scale. The server CPU usage went down significantly - see http://bit.ly/1vqp1ki

So, more request can be served with a smaller number of servers.

As noblogs.org is completely no-profit, and anonymous as much as possible, and does not contain ads, linkbait is not an option :)

Of course, this isn't anything new for some audience, but I think that is an indipendent media blog, so the story can still fit its audience.

The only workaround I see I declaring you have moved to the US. I work for a US corporation and with the company VPN I'm allowed to see the 2.99 $ price, but when I log in I'm told I can only buy titles from amazon.it.

So, no luck, we're stuck with 19 euros (which is still a good price though).

Same problem here. I am supposedly on vacation in Barcelona and was summoned to help :/ Gotta love your java.