Before I get to the actual rules, let me tell you a story. A few weeks ago, I was approached by an HR Associate of a Bangalore-based e-Learning Solutions company. They had an "Engineering Manager" opening, for which this HR fellow thought my profile was well suited. After going through the Job Description, I felt the role was a bit more "technical" than I would like. But then again, most companies do give a technical slant to their Project Manager JDs, to ensure that the candidate has some past coding experience, instead of being a typical "MBA-pass manager". So I asked him to go ahead and schedule a telephonic discussion. Soon he called me and told me that his CTO Mr. Charles Dickhead (not his real name) would call me on the morning of 27th December. He also said that he'd send a confirmation email, which never came. Still I remained available at that time, just in case CD gave me a call. When the call didn't come, I went on with my day, and forgot about the position.
Out of the blue, the HR guy called me again yesterday and apologized for the non-availability of CD due to Christmas (on 27th December???) and confirmed the rescheduled telephonic interview for today afternoon. Since I've been giving many interviews of late for Project Manager positions, I did not feel it necessary to do any specific preparation. If you've managed projects for 7 years, including Development, Production Support and Upgrade projects, across various technologies, you can manage practically any IT project. All that an interview needs to check is the depth of your PM experience, along with your personality and fitment to the organization. But CD apparently had other ideas, because he outsourced the job of taking my interview to someone else, let's call him Mr. AK-47. To my horror, this guy followed up the standard, much-abused "tell me more about yourself" question with a set of queries that are normally reserved for freshers straight out of engineering college.
"What are the differences between the deployment of a Java project and that of a PHP project?" was followed by "What are the key features of MVC architecture?" By the time I'd wriggled my way out of those two, I realized that AK was at best a Technical Architect, at worst a Tech Lead, and most likely that amorphous entity called a Project Lead. He had probably never met a person with 14+ years of IT experience, much less interviewed one. As I desperately tried to talk myself out of jumping through the window, AK came up with a classic: "What are the 4 pillars of Object Oriented Programming?" As I hemmed and hawed, not knowing whether to kill him or strangle myself, I managed to blurt out "polymorphism" and "inheritance". Sensing that I was choking on the question, AK helpfully came up with "abstraction" and "encapsulation". At this point I was wondering how to end this nightmare, when AK went and outdid himself, if at all that was possible. He said, "Give a one-line definition of each of the 4 pillars." That was it for me; I openly told AK that his questions were far too technical for me, and that I couldn't answer them. AK decided to put me out of my agony by ending the interview and offering to convey "his feedback" to the CTO.
So, without further ado, here are the 5 rules you need to follow while outsourcing interviews, which you were supposed to take, to your juniors:
1. Team Member interviews can be outsourced to Team Leads and above
2. Team Lead interviews can be outsourced to Project Leads and above
3. Project Lead interviews can be outsourced to Project Managers and above
4. Project Manager interviews can be outsourced to Senior Managers and above
5. Never break any of the above 4 rules. Never! NEVER EVER!!!
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