The inappropriate interview

Okay, I was in this company for an interview recently, I believe it's called Encora Technologies, for this "PHP" position. I got interviewed by this funny manager they had, don't even remember his name, honestly, don't think it carries any significance anyways.

First, I don't think this manager had and qualifications to conduct a technical interview. By qualifications i don't mean some jazzy certifications, but the knowledge, aptitude, attitude and most of all modesty in accepting things outside his knowledge box.

I don't consider myself "brilliant!" at what i do, I know there are better ways to do certain things, and i'm always seeking those better ways, I have no shame in accepting that there are million things i'm yet to know, but i find it extremely offending when some tells i'm wrong, when i'm actually right. This manager was one of those kinds, "If he din't know it, It must not exist" .


So his company runs business running PHP, Everybody in his company runs Windows (huh?), So the conversation goes like this:

manager: Have you worked on linux?
me: yeah, All my working life.
manager: Whats a 'pipe'?
me: --- A long response --
manager: have you used sed / awk?
me: yeah, a long time ago, I use Perl now ;)
manager: sed's faster, (..sort of suggests why sed's better than perl)

I mean If he really wanted to quiz about UNIX, did he just want me to know pipes, thats it? nothing more on UNIX? nothing at all.

Anyways, the thought of using sed because sed's faster bust me into two,

1. Why would a company that's so concerned about speed use PHP anyways?
2. Perl's quicker, Java is quicker and of course C is way quicker!

Then i rattled a little about perl's awesome regular expressions and compared it with regular expressions and back references in sed. I realized at this moment with his clueless nods that he'd never used sed either. Shit! Im being interviewd by a technical duck head, who wanted to prove by the way of force that his way was the correct way. I soon found out that, If i did join, i'd be reporting into this crack head, I called the HR and told them i wasn't interested in this job.


The most annoying part about this whole interview process was the fact that this manager wasn't even listening to me, he dint want to give me sheets of paper to describe Singleton Pattern's implementation in PHP, He dint think he could use LIMIT on UPDATE and DELETE statment in SQL (MySQL of course).

I do believe that during an interview process there are two parties forming their perceptions about each other, I do not say that interviewer has to be technically a better programmer than the interviewee, but he needs to be open to that fact.