One more, very recent.
I am interviewing for Programmer/Analyst position for Health Insurance company.
First interview with Project Leader. She tells me a bunch of stories, how their systems work, including the one where they just installed new VB transactional system (?!?!? :roll: ) instead of their old mainframe-base. So she says that they were trying to do stuff in VB, but it is slow (duh!) and so now they do most of their processing in SQL.
So I ask her "are you sure it a is a VB system, because your data volumes seem to be pretty high?" and she says "yes, we selected among a number of systems, and this one was the closest in functionality to our business". Fine, but I still don't understand why VB and not C++, it is, after all, a transactional system with batch processing capability. Turns out later, the business process is actually written in C++, but they are not allowed to change it; anything they change is VB.
Fine, so they say that they also have problems transferring data from old system to new one, and it might be a big project. Well, I've done that before for a medium size company, and I picked brains of few people who've done it for giants, so I know it's not big deal, and I offer my help. Which she politely ignores.
Next interview - Tech Lead. After a few minutes into discussion I realize my knowledge is a lot broader then this guy's. First he asks me a few simple questions, and then we go to architecture. He asks "where whould you put business logic in a 3-tier app?" I start drawing an example, we talk a little about how'd you invoke dlls, etc. Eventually we get to a point where I say "I don't know this exactly, I think it'll work like this..." and he says "well, I don't know either, I was just curious, 'cause we haven't done it here yet"
So I have an impression that I am majorly overqualified for this position. A week later it turns out to be the truth, their excuse was that my salaray range was too high.
I am generally bored being interviewed for Programmer/Analyst position, because I know even if they think my knowledge is not deep enough for anything higher and hire me, I'll pick it up and be overqualified in 3 months.
Shura
[ May 10, 2002: Message edited by: Shura Balaganov ]