Today I had the somewhat dubious fortune of tech screening candidates for a mid level Unix admin gig at my office.  I mean, both candidates that I screened performed about equally well for the question set but the really couldn't have been any further apart in terms of demeanor.



The first guy talked around the questions an awful lot before offering a non-committal (though usually correct) answer.  His voice bounced around a bit and in the stories he told while he was getting around to answering the questions I had for him he seemed to be trying to buy himself some time.  After one question his phone went mute for a bit and he returned with an answer that was a verbatim match for the Wikipedia article on which protocols DNS uses.  To this I was a bit less than impressed but still it was the correct answer so I marked it down as such along with my observation for the hiring manager.

Impressing me even less, however, after wrapping up the slate of questions an opening the floor to questions from him he asked me that most awkward of things, "So, how did I do?  Honestly?  I mean, can you make sure that I get some kind of feed back whether or not I'm selected?"  I really don't like being put on the spot that way when I'm not the hiring manager for a position, I'm really limited in what I can say at that point and usually go with "I really can't say, the hiring manager will be in touch with you regarding next steps."  In this particular case the candidate sounded a bit desperate for feedback that I really wasn't comfortable giving, probably because he's been out of a full-time gig for a while.  I felt kind of terrible giving my stock answer but it's really the best answer that I can give, ethically.

As a side note, I also feel that it's a bit on the inappropriate side to ask your interviewer about your performance.  While I get that sometimes people are just looking for constructive feedback more often I find it shows a disturbing depth to any confidence problems a candidate might have been exhibiting during an interview; for me it's a red flag.  When I interview a candidate I discuss the questions with them, giving feedback on each and every individual answer as we go along; there really should be no question of performance.  As much as it might hurt not to know, it might actually hurt more to ask so just don't do it.  (If you're not taking notes about the things you're struggling on during the interview then you are failing as an interview candidate, BTW.)

True Story: While going through a tech screening for a position at Apple I found that I wasn't as completely with it regarding threads/fibers/IPC as they'd have liked and had zero knowledge of ZFS to speak of.  I still made enough of an impression to warrant a full day's round of interviews so I spent the couple of days before that reading everything I could on ZFS, threading and IPC.  When I got into the first round of the face-to-face interview I was asked, "So, I assume you've boned up on ZFS, threading and IPC, yes?  Good, I'm not going to ask anything about that stuff. I just wanted to know if you'd study up between then and now. Lets talk about cars!"  The moral of the story is this: if you're not taking notes and revisiting the things that cause you trouble you're not going to demonstrate yourself to be a good value to a potential employer, even if they never grill you on it again.