Tips for Job Interviews

I’ve helped execute a few job interviews for work this last week and I wanted to pass along a few tips for my readers here who for some reason may not have heard these tips:

  1. Only be yourself if that’s good advice.  If you’re really a jerk, don’t be yourself.  Everyone else: don’t be fake.
  2. If the end of each of the answers you have to any number of questions concludes with something like, “…and that’s why I think I’m perfect for this job,” then you’re more than likely not perfect for the job.  That is of course unless they ask you over and over why you’re perfect for the job.  If they are asking that one question over and over you probably have found a job that is not perfect.
  3. If someone asks you to tell them about yourself, tell them briefly about yourself.  Do not tell them almost about yourself, about what your department does, your sex life, or anything else that is either far too explicit or not actually about yourself.
  4. If someone asks you when was the last time you were dishonest at work the correct answer is always one of two things: 1) I am always honest or 2) When I didn’t tell them I was coming to interview for another position.
  5. If you are asked about your career aspirations give something concrete.  We don’t care if you want to be the first person to discover a unicorn’s remains in the mid-layers of the earth’s crust, but we do care that you have a solid, clear answer.  Dancing around the answer to the question because you’re not sure is way worse than saying you’re not sure.
  6. Use Google to determine even more about the company you’re applying at.  In our case knowing roughly what our company produces (besides a tremendous amount of awesome) will get your far with almost all the leadership.  If there’s a product you can touch, find it to touch if at all possible.  If it’s software, install it.  If it is anything you can look at or experience in a safe, legal way – get it and look at it and experience it!
  7. Be ready to give feedback about the product or products you interacted with.  Be nice, though.  A lot of blood sweat and tears goes into different products so ripping into them is worse than just canceling the interview 🙂
  8. Know the key, broader principles that you operate by so that you can address issues you’re less specific with as specifically and effectively as possible.  Example: I know that there are a tremendous number of programming languages that are available today but I’m competent in a few of them and the principles behind good, clean software development apply to all of them.  If I get asked about C# (which I’ve only tinkered with) I can at least tell the person I’m familiar with Java and would be willing to learn C# if the job required it.
  9. Be punctual – don’t be late, but don’t be 30 minutes early
  10. Come prepared with questions for the interviewers.  They’re going to interview you, but return the favor.  Think of a past job that stank because you didn’t have a great relationship with a manager, or you hated a certain process.  Avoid repeat situations by asking questions about specific details that you either are very familiar with or are able to speak to knowledgeably.  This is probably better than a 2 page resume (with too much information on it) for revealing your competency.

What are your tips, readers?

Apple: Even Missing Features is Feature

The new Apple iPod Nano is missing an internal gyroscope (or 3) to know which way is up.  Never fear: it’s a feature.  Steve Jobs demoed the device this week and was saying how cool it was you could use your hands to rotate the display.  They should have used the ‘3D’ technology from the Nintendo 3DS to make the display render in all 4 directions.

Factual Friday: Acrylic Drums

Just to add to the ‘way too much’ nature of this blog: I learned to play the drumset in Jr. High on the school’s acrylic drums.  They were clear, tuned poorly, and older than the entire drum section’s ages combined.  We loved them.  We played and played on them.  No animals or trees were harmed in their manufacturing, unless of course you consider that plastic is a petroleum biproduct, in which case animals and plants may have been harmed quite some time ago for their manufacturing.  I’m pretty sure PETA would protest those drums and put paint on them.  We’d probably have hit the PETA members back with the wooden drum sticks we all carried around with us EVERYWHERE.

Why Your Love Language Doesn’t Matter

Have you ever found something so revolutionary that it changed the way you did things? In my life I have found a number of things that made my head spin, my world clearer, or my world bigger. In the late 90’s one such idea came from a book that really got me churning that was called “The Five Love Languages.” It seemed to make relationships between a husband and wife simpler and easier to grasp than the odd complexity I had developed prior to reading it.  It made me want to explore love with my bride-to-be.  The problem with such concepts as the five love languages is that people hear them, learn them, or come into contact with them and them get set off in the wrong direction because they don’t understand them as merely principles.

If you’re not familiar with the five love languages let me give you this simple list of the five:

  1. Words of Affirmation
  2. Quality Time
  3. Receiving Gifts
  4. Acts of Service
  5. Physical Touch

The gist of the book is that each person has a primary way that they perceive  and express love with their spouse.  Furthermore each spouse is strongly encouraged to explore their partner’s love language and keep that in mind when expressing love for him or her.  I spent quite a bit of time liking the idea of focusing on exploring my bride’s love language and even figured out that this could be used, in a modified way, with my friends to express care for them.  Ta-da!  So did the book’s authors and other books in the series of love languages and their application were born and money was had through conferences, tests, merchandising and copyright infringement lawsuits from unlicensed tattoos [I made that last one up].  This is psychology stuff, so I’m sure that someone also discovered a sixth, seventh and eighth love language and has been trying to write papers proving the adequacy of those numbers of love languages for thesis papers and making a good practice out of helping marriages and relationships discover their tertiary love language.

Here’s the rub: this is overly complex despite the simplicity and it gets used as a poor excuse for husbands and wives to not love one another.  At least not to their fullest.  I want to explain that moving forward from here I’m going to be focused on a few Bible verses that I think make the five love languages childs play, and probably unnecessary.  The first place we should take a look is Ephesians 5:22-27:

Wives, be subject to your own husbands, as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife, as Christ also is the head of the church, He Himself being the Savior of the body. But as the church is subject to Christ, so also the wives ought to be to their husbands in everything. Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ also loved the church and gave Himself up for her, so that He might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, that He might present to Himself the church in all her glory, having no spot or wrinkle or any such thing; but that she would be holy and blameless.

What I see as I meditate on the above passage is something beyond the five love languages and something that should drive a wife absolutely coo-coo-bananas in love with her husband.  A self-sacrificing husband.  A guy who takes the five love languages in, sees their inadequacy, and says, “I’m going to love you in a million ways, and these five are merely a tiny, tiny tip of the iceberg.”  I recently saw on Twitter a guy who said that he was sorry to his wife (publicly on Twitter?) that his primary love language was acts of service.  Lameness.  If her love language is knitting pot holders it doesn’t matter.  If his language was bringing stray cats home to be fed, bathed, and neutered it doesn’t matter.  Sacrificial love trumps all of the given concepts of love languages because it looks for opportunities to love in every aspect, every place, and it is not strapped to a single, primary concept of perceived or expressed love.

As a secondary point against not stopping with this love language concept is that one of the joys of my marriage with my wife has been exploring each of the facets of expression of love and trying to see how they can be expressed in deeper, more meaningful ways.  Just as humans mature (or at least should mature) we look for ways to express love in a sacrificial, yet exploratory way.  To make a food analogy just because I like vanilla ice cream doesn’t mean I don’t explore toppings, other flavors and other combinations within the world of ice cream (or frozen desserts).  The same analogy applied to music means I don’t stop at the Beatles just because I like rock and roll quartets.  Bring on trios [Cream], duos [Simon & Garfunkel], classical, dance, beat boxing, and opera*.

I’ve discovered that my wife pretty much likes all five love languages [in different quantities at different times] because she knows that they’re expressing love to her.  I would probably not be wrong in saying that 99.999% of guys love physical touch [which often gets interpreted as physical intimacy, and for the sake of argument I’m going there now], but if let us face the facts: not all gals are wired for 24/7 physical touching and there may come a time when they’re bleeding, PMS-ing, medically unavailable, or holding a kitchen knife.  It might be a good time, Mr. physical touch, to explore the finer nuances of quality time, words of affirmation, gifts [read: chocolate], or acupressure to relieve headaches.  Sacrificially speaking get a grip, turn off your hormones for a moment and love your wife some other way so she doesn’t feel the need to lock herself in the bathroom, wear chain armor, or buy a slice-wire-bikini from Victoria’s Secret Weapon.

I want to close by saying I don’t hate the general principles behind the five love languages.  They were a good starting point for me and helped me grasp why I might be miss-communicating with my bride-to-be.  They’re not an excuse to be short sighted, justify weaknesses, or get in a rut.  Make it a point to look for ways to create a richer, more complex relationship with your spouse by abandoning your love language and loving with your exploratory, revolutionary hats on.

*Stay away from country music which is an infectious disease [Just kidding (Not really)]