A week full of activity

Last week was full of Activity. on Monday and Tuesday, I worked for 14 hours a day under a "unrealistic" target. Whew! Wednesday and Thursday were bit eased up with 10 hours of work. I had to accede to such unplanned and a work without a process as it was a request from the client. Friday was a day of relaxation with absolutely nothing to work on except going thru the BRD of the work for the subsequent week.

On the weekend, I met some of my colleagues from previous companies and the topic immediately was the burgeoning job market in Bangalore and Hyderabad, and interview (er)s. It seems one of them has attended an interview with a major telecom company in Hyderabad. The first round went off well, both the interviewer and interviewee enjoyed the discussion talking many things about technology, issues faced in the project and how they have been resolved. The next round, it seems, was pathetic.

An (incompetent) interviewer with more than 8 years of experience and miserable communication took the second round. I couldnot help laughing when my friend told that the person literally barged into the room, shook hands and immediately asked about JVM architecture and the difference between "==" and ".equals()". My friend got a shock of his life at the crude behavior and started answering with patience. Soon, he realized that the interviewer is expecting bookish answers and is reluctant to accept any answers other than what he had in the mind. My friend should have known "Telepathy". A couple of funny questions and answers from the interview:

Interviewer: "Which method will you use for file upload, doGet() or doPost() "
My Friend:"doPost(), as multipart requests are supported, explained about multipart requests, form processing of the fileupload, limitations with doGet()"
Interviewer:"Fine, but you didn't tell that doGet() doesn't support transfer of binary content."

A more funny interaction occured at a later stage..

Interviewer:"Do you know design patterns? How did you use them in your projects?"
My Friend;"I know core java patterns and J2EE patterns, but don't use them because they are there. If there is a compelling reason, I use a design pattern. In my projects I used Factory, Visitor, Singleton.. the list went on"
Interviewer:"Hold on.. You said Singleton.. How did you use Singleton, How did you implement a Perfect Singleton?"
My Friend: (Routine Question)..gave the bookish answer the interviewer was expecting and the end added "I prefer using registries instead of singletons as singletons are not interface friendly and pose problem in a clustered application"
Now it was the turn of the interviewer to get shocked and it seems he was reluctant to take the answer and started arguing insensibly. My friend remained silent, nodded his head in agreement to whatever the other person said and finally got an offer from the company and now the interviewer is his project lead..hehehe!
These days it is not uncommon to hear about such incidents.