Something that Neither Money nor Master Card Can Buy

Updated on 8/26/2007 at 9:41 a.m. to include clarification on the context of the interview.

Being chided for not listing polymorphism as one of the things I liked most about object oriented programming: 2 minutes

Being derided for not listing binary compatibility as a disadvantage of function inlining: 3 minutes

Criticism for not viewing template instantiation as a form of inlining: 1 minute

Being grilled and chided for not knowing how to write the signature for a C++ method that accepts both standard library string objects and C style strings: 5 minutes

Being grilled over how order of insertion is handled with the STL multimap template class: 5 minutes

Being patronized for not being able to list all of the reasons that reference counting is of importance for memory pools: 5 minutes

Being told that no one uses select() for I/O multiplexing: 2 minutes

Being treated as incompetent for not using a thread pool to handle high volume data throughputs the same way that the interviewer would: 5 minutes

Listening to interviewer talk about the sheer amount of talent held by the computer science and mathematics people in their quantitative research: 3 minutes

Making the interviewer squrim and stutter and finally say, "I don't know," when asked how much their quantitative research group lost last week and the week before: priceless

Yeah, that's how I spent my late Friday afternoon... Interviewing for a position at the Gong Show Panelist Investment Bank with the software developer equivalent of Kahn Souphanousinphone with somewhat better English.

After this many months of interviewing, I don't suffer the assholes lightly. I don't lose my cool during the interviewing, but I sure know how to turn the tables when it's my turn to ask the questions.