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I enjoy interviewing folks, I really do. The hallmark of a great interview is one in which I think I’ve given the candidate some new insight, and the candidate has given me one as well. That’s a person I want to work with, and one in which I hope they want to work with us, or more specifically me. Hallmarks of a BAD interview:

* tell me about what you did in school, when you graduated from school some 5+ years ago

* tell me that you like to work in teams to learn from someone else (when it’s obvious you’re not teaching anyone else anything)

* tell how you want to be a manager or architect in 2+years, when you’ve not yet had a chance to demonstrate much in the software world

My latest story of awfulness involved a candidate who, when interviewing as a tester was asked what open source test toolkits they had used, then proceeded to confuse JDBC and JUnit. One is a mechanism for querying databases; one is a toolkit for unit tests. Forgive me my geekiness for being really annoyed when she blended the two, but I am enough of a geek to be annoyed at scenarios that confuse the two.

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I just saw the final score of the Super Bowl on a news site.  I had been watching the game, but the parental thing kicked in, and bedtime for my kids called.  After that, the urge to watch the rest just wasn’t there, not when I could get near real-time score updates through the local paper.

I had been rooting for the Patriots.  Hey, the idea of completing a perfect season has a real ring to it.  And this wasn’t just some cocky team from New York.  Not that the Giants were cocky, but being from Baltimore, I have a problem rooting for somebody from New York.

I have to give New York their due, though.  The parts of the game I did see were impressive.  I was still rooting for Brady to come through, but it was to come through after the beating that the Giants were giving him.  Nearly every play it looked like he was getting dinged by somebody.

My husband was talking with his mother this evening, who was watching the game live.  I had the game on Tivo-pause, on the theory that I’d go back down and continue (this was early in the whole kid-to-bed process).  She said that the Giants had just scored a touchdown, but that the game wasn’t over.  From watching the scores on the news site, looks like it was a good head-to-head.

There are doubtless sports writers now scrambling to throw away paragraphs of preconceived outcomes of the game.  More power to the Giants for coming through, for showing that they weren’t just showing up.  I still would’ve liked to see the Patriots get the perfect topping for the season, but I guess they’ll just have to take the records they did win, and use the loss as fuel for next year’s run.