Shabbir's Diary

Interviewing!

I don't know why you would want to see the larger version, but if so, you can click on the photo.

411: In my office, filling out interview evaluations

Listening to: Bill Hicks, "Dangerous"

We're working our butts off these days. Change is all around, and as I have come to learn, nobody stays in a job forever. This isn't a bad thing, but this has taught me that I'll probably be interviewing people for the rest of my life.

I don't wish to sound mercenary, but I can tell you there's a lot to learn from interviewing people. The more often you attempt to put yourself in someone else's shoes, the more you get a chance to challenge and examine your worldviews, and if you're lucky, modify them to better fit the world around you. And you might just learn something about how other successful companies do things. I don't mean in an espionage way, but in an "approach to business" sort of way.

Also, it's a useful skill to learn how to read people, and interviewing is basically like a 30 minute application of that skill (also useful in poker, of course). If you have any knack for it at all, you can direct your questions in an increasingly pointed manner until you have the candidate's "interview face" dropped.

You know this has happened when they shift body stance and tone of voice. When that happens, the most amazing things come out of their mouths. It can be either endearing or alienating. Once or twice I've actually pulled this off on the telephone, but it's really an in-person skill, because it requires body language, eye contact, and tone of voice.

Just like diamond mining, you have to sift through a lot of old lava to find the good stuff. Here's my list of the worst things ever said to me in a job interview once their guard was down:

"Is there an opportunity for travel, or are people stuck here?"

"When I worked at [enormous Internet bubble company], it became an awful place once the suits showed up. Oh, does the dress code here require a suit? I'm not very comfortable in a suit."

Unable to adequately express why they were interested in working in Mindshare, an applicant once confessed, "I sent out a lot of resumes, I didn't have a chance to learn much about you before the interview.." Hey, that makes me feel special!

When asked, "What sort of work environment do you fit best in?", the optimal answer is not, "I like to work by myself, with my headphones on. I don't really like to talk to my colleagues."

Once, when interviewing a man for whom my gaydar said, "This guy's as straight as Bruce Willis", I heard, "Your photo on your website doesn't do you justice. You're much more attractive in person."

Please. Not only is that not going to get you the job, but it makes me uncomfortable in a work setting with someone I just met.

One of my officemates actually heard, "I know exactly what you're looking for, and that's me."

Oh fudge. I must have written "cocky bastard" as a job requirement in my classified ad.

My bad.

A favor, you ask?

Of course, click on the photo to get the larger one.

Listening to: Satie's "Gnossienne No. 1"

Me: Please, I'll do anything. These academic hoodlums have stolen my wife and they refuse to return her. I'm allowed to see her on weekends, but even then, they interfere, making her perform "regression analysis" and other disgusting acts.

Dogfather: Why did you not come to me first? Why did you appeal to others before coming to me? My brother is First Dog to your wife, and yet you haven't once invited me to come dig in your yard, or even share in the bones from all those steaks to eat.

Me: I didn't want to get into trouble.

Dogfather: I understand. You found paradise with your First Dog. He had no rambunctious qualities. You had no need for me. But now that these idyllic qualities cannot spring your wife from her ivy-clad oppressors, you come to me for help. And on the day of my daughter's howling. You don't even respect me enough to call me Dogfather.

If you had come to me in friendship, offered me an extra meal or two, then I would be doing this favor for you without even asking.

Me: Please, Dogfather, be my friend.

Dogfather: Someday, and that day may never come, I'll call upon you to do a service for me. But, until that day - accept this justice as a gift on my daughter's howling day.

Firefly (an amazing series)

http://www.netflix.com/MovieDisplay?movieid=60033036&trkid=73

The Education of a Poker Player

The perils of waking up before your partner

http://smitten.typepad.com/smitten/2003/11/8_am_sunday_mor.html

Sentencing haiku

Hungry Dakota
Squeeling tires end the career
No time for goodbye

The hypocrisy of bourgeois asceticism

http://www.granick.com/archive/2004_01_01_theshout_archive.html#107456106964105727

Do you want to know who Sarah is?

http://www.imber.net/archives/000445.html#000445

Anal Sex: The New Black

http://belledejour-uk.blogspot.com/2004_01_01_belledejour-uk_archive.html#107365813669215976

The winter semester begins

You know the drill, right? Click on the dogs to get a larger, more adorable photo of them.

411: En route to Harvard

Listening to: "Naked in Baghdad" by Anne Garrels

I woke up in Boston again.

This always unnerves me. I feel as if significant distance travel requires significant time. It's weird to wake up in DC one day and then be in Boston a few hours later. I feel as if more days should pass in between the cities.

January means the start of school, and therefore the loss of my wife to an institution of higher learning. We piled all her stuff into the car, left a little room for the dogs and her snowboard in the backseat, and started the very same drive that countless parents of 18 year olds are familiar with.

The dogs don't get breakfast when they make this trip. It takes them at least half an hour to stop whining in the backseat, and once that happens it's too easy to psyche yourself into thinking they have to go to the bathroom. After a quick rest stop (where they never actually go because they're wound too tight) you then have to wait another half hour for them to get calm again. Easier to let them miss a meal and sleep through this entire trip.

On the way to Boston we listened to the audio CD of Anne Garrels' "Naked in Baghdad", her account of the recent war in Iraq. Unlike many other journalists, she wasn't "embedded", but parked herself at the Palestine Hotel in downtown Baghdad and worked with cooperative Iraqis to get her stories.

Broadcasting from her hotel with an illegally-kept satellite phone, Garrels repeatedly scooped other news organizations with stories that unearthed details others didn't even bother to try getting. She credits several factors for her success:

Excellent guides: Garrels credits her success in every conflict situation to the assistance of whomever becomes her local guide. She has a good sense for such people, and in Baghdad she meets Amir who is so amazingly resourceful that he can find a case of French bordeuax in a war zone, while other reporters are happy to be eating stale macaroni and cheese.

She's not a tv reporter: It's distinctly easier to get people to open up and talk when you aren't sticking a 20 lb. camera in their face.

She's an older woman: Being a woman allows her access to female enclaves that men can't access. Being older allows her not to have to deal with her gender. She describes a rare interview with an Islamic cleric that wouldn't have been possible had she been younger and possibly, "attractive".

Garrels' pieces aired on NPR, but what I found engaging is that she isn't really the kind of run of the mill anti-war kook that one usually associates with public radio. Nothing offends me more than the blind ra-ra of the anti-Bush, anti-war crowd, and you can find that in spades on NPR. Start using the analytic part of your mind and you'll find yourself offended by zealots of both sides, turned off by both Democratic and Republican rhetoric. This will ruin both Fox and NPR for you, by the way.

A Garrels skewering is like watching a stammering boyfriend with lipstick on his shirt dig his own hole. Throughout the war she highlights the suffering of the Iraqi people, and continues to point out the absence of Saddam Hussein. When it becomes vogue in the States to shout, "self determination for the Iraqis", she simply does man on the street interviews with Iraqis who say 'give us a year and we'll take care of Saddam ourselves'. Yeah, get right on that guys, we'll wait over here.

When the peace movement becomes a sacred cow, she starts interviewing the "human shields" that went to Iraq and find themselves way over their head, being used by the government and their fellow shields deserting them like the Elite Republican Guard fleeing a bunker.

And of course, when it comes to the White House, neither she nor anyone else has to try that hard. Just say "Weapons of Mass Destruction", and that pretty much sums it up.

Garrels doesn't need spin to skewer the hypocritical. What she shows us is that with our own words and deeds, we do that just fine all by ourselves.

And as Garrels wraps up her stay in Iraq, the Marines arrive in Baghdad and we pull up at Sarah's apartment in Boston.

I'm glad someone is finally home.