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>> Anyway, they want to know some pretty serious stuff - where were you
>> born, have you been outside the country in the last 10 years, do you
>> have a girlfriend,
>
> And what if you are gay or, worse, a girl?
Ooo, that would probably *incrase* your changes of being hired - they
have to hire a certain percentage of "minority groups" to prove that
they are in fact an "equal opportunities employer". (I'm not making this
up. Several questions are explicitly marked as being for this purpose.)
> Unless your boss and the site manager have been fired for gross
> incompetence or are dead they could still serve as a reference, I would
> think.
Not if you can't contact them, no.
> There must be examples of you and your boss or the IT in the US trying
> to solve the internet problems. Even designing the network in your new
> building may be an example. E-mailing counts as 'working together' in
> this context
There probably *should* be examples of us working together, but sadly
there isn't. They tend to regard me as just being the tea boy. The
network in the new building is *not* the design I came up with. I had a
plan written and everything, and then they showed up and just did
something completely different, and I had to reverse engineer to find
out exactly what they did. I'm still not 100% sure.
Similarly, fault finding usually consists of them saying "have you done
X?" [when I already told them I have], and then they say "OK, hold on,
we'll look at it". And maybe at some point they come back with an
answer. Not much "working together" actually happens.
I could possibly mention the change-over of our firewall. That's about
the most "interactive" thing we ever did. But replacing one box with
another one hardly counts as a "complex problem", which is what the
question demands.
The notes say it doesn't have to be a work-related example, but you know
what *my* social life looks like...!
>> 2. Please describe an example of when you delivered a high quality
>> piece of work that you were proud of.
>
> What about the procedures document you had written? Even if you are
> psychologically unable to be proud on something you did, this is the
> sort of things they want to hear.
Good point. Several external auditors have reputedly "liked" these. And
I was quite pleased at having replaced an ad hoc, weakly structured
document with something that has a precise structure and is convinient
to read for the target audience [external auditors].
>> After all, reinventing obscure mathematics hardly counts as
>> "solving" a "problem"...
>
> It does. The problem to solve is how to implement it. Many of the things
> you did in Haskell will neatly fit in this category.
Most of my Haskell stuff I did from reading books. But perhaps "I
learned Haskell" would count as an "unusual task" where I "learned
something new" (i.e., a radically different way of seeing computer
programs). That seems like stretching things a little though...
>> 4. Please describe a time when you took on a task that illustrates
>> your active interest in this area of work and allowed you to develop
>> new skills.
>>
>> Uuuhhhh... Well I can tell you all manner of things I've learned out
>> of pure curiosity. But things I learned because of attempting to
>> perform a specific "task"?
>
> More Haskell here. Or your non-linear equations, point to Zazzle as proof.
Or that time I learned PostScript in my lunch break just because I was
so bored that day.
However, when you write "I once learned to program in PostScript in my
lunch break because I was really bored that day", it doesn't sound all
that good.
Again, it asks for a specific *task* where you learned something new.
Doing something to stave off boredom isn't a "task".
> Are there no simple to answer questions like: 'are you the mascot of an
> internet society' or 'are you the subject of a webcomic'?
LMAO! Damn, if only *those* could be job requirements...
[Actually, they probably are. But what the hell is the job??]
--
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*
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