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.