I recently attended an interview for a Technical Lead position. The interviewer (a very bright intellectual, especially if he's reading this blog!) asked me a series of questions around software development in general and specific questions around theory behind exceptions and threads. While I could answer most of the standard questions along with what I've been doing, I failed to impress him on the theoretical questions. Not that I did not know the answer or was not familiar with the concepts, but that it has been a while since I've read about them or used them. As a technical lead, combined with offshore development, the focus nowadays I believe has shifted more to design, process, and governance as opposed to hands-on development (which is where the offshore piece comes in). This made me wonder how we select people for a particular task.
It's interesting how your career or future depends on how you perform at a single instance regardless of how better or worse you've performed in the past. Our entire system seems to have been built around this concept - be it education, sports, politics, or job. Exams, match formats, and interviews all favor how alert you are on a given moment in time with respect ot the opposition compared to how you've been doing over time.
While I can understand the current rationale behind this (it's not feasible to keep track of everyone at all times to see how they do, especially those who you don't know, such as potential candidates for job), I think it's quite out-dated and incorrect.
Most US universities at least at the collegiate level use a combination of your final exam marks along with how you've done in all your assignments and interim exams, with varied weights. I fail to see why the same concept cannot be applied to other areas. Let me take the specific scenarios I mentioned above and provide some alternate examples.
Sports
This is probably the more controversial of the lot since it's not just the process, but also the thrill provided by the finish. Nevertheless, instead of providing a point win-lose scenario, why not have a weighted system, where, say, the number of wins up to finals accounts for, say, 40% of the final game, while the remaining 60% goes to the final game itself? Such a mechanism will provide a fair ground to a team that, say, has been winning for the whole tournament but ends up losing in the last match. In such a case, their past record will provide an additional boost for them to keep up the momentum to win the final piece.
Game Shows
Game shows are no different from sports in that they are a type of a sport, with similar format. A recent example which added to my thoughts is the latest season of the Biggest Loser, a game show in USA where the person who loses the most weight by the end of the season gets a grand prize. In the show, an ex-model Tara, won all the rounds handily including all additional challenges, but lost the final weigh-in by 5 pounds. I thought it was a bit unfair and sends a relatively wrong message, since her opponent seemed to have lost a little too much weight! With a weighted system, her past victories would have contributed to her final score and would have helped her, especially since she lost by such a small margin.
Politics
Another controversial topic I am sure, and definitely harder to implement, but think about this. Why not have a system where, in an election, the winner is selected not just by votes on how they did in the election process but also on how they performed during the previous tenure? While I am no political expert, I can think of some fairly reasonable metrics to measure the performance during a tenure such as the attendance of the politicians in the parliament procedures, the percentage of growth in development in various sectors, relative stability of the country - both economically and militarily, potentially calculated by level of threat, people confidence, GDP growth, and inflation rate. I am sure more metrics can be added.
Such a system would ensure that only a candidate, either ruling or opposition, who has really worked for his/her people is selected for another term, without being swayed by last minute sympathy waves or other external criteria. It also tends to be more meritocratic and will tend to keep the politicians on bay WHILE they are in power and not after.
Job
Finally, to something that made me write this blog. I think the evolution of Internet has provided some excellent opportunities to change the way we select candidates. Instead of deciding the worth of a candidate in a 30 minute interview, why not combine the responses with other factors such as what they have done outside their core skillset? This could include how active they are in social networking sites, what sites they are active on, what they have contributed, and so on. This is similar to valuing PhD candidates based on the articles they have written on conferences they've attended, for example.
Such a weighted system would not only help a team lead pick the candidate with the right technical background (based on the interview) but also with the right passion, interest, and intellect, given that you need more than just technical smarts to execute a project.
Is this a gripe because the interviewer didn't consider my candidate worthy? No. I honestly believe that human nature is more complicated than a binary solution and that a weighted system that evaluates a person over time (what we would call experience) is a more accurate measure.
