Chan's Personal Blog

Every term at our work, we interview university co-op students to fill programming positions. We hire often because the average student works either a 4 to 8 months before they have to go back to school. Most often, I get to interview these students as well, so I've seen my share of interviews.

My boss was interviewing right before the Christmas break, and she had one really bad interview with a student. Pretty much right off the bat, the student said that he absolutely hated the software that we write, and how the system was no good. Great, start the interview by insulting the programmers and their software.

The interview proceeded anyways, but the chance of employment was dead on arrival. Near the end, the student kind of realized his error and tried to backtrack a bit on his earlier comments, but it was too late.

Who honestly goes into an interview and denounces the company's main product? What happened to being positive and upbeat in an interview?

Apparently the student was acting that way because the student assumed that my boss was some human resources representative. He assumed that the hiring person wasn't part of the software development team, and thus fairly detached from the software, and wouldn't care about his comments. That is one heck of an assumption. It's also belittleling to my boss as well considering she's the program manager of the project.

What's even funnier is that the student later called and asked if he was being considered for the position, because he had a job offer, but he really wanted our job. He got a resounding no.