[sdiy] Who Needs a Degree?

[Veronica Merryfield]

> Feel free to draw your own conclusions about university education in 2010.

Don't need to. I use to interview them afterwards. (I worked in Vancouver for a while and interviewed a number of UBC and SF grads - some were great, some weren't).

After a few years of interviewing, where I developed the strategy of taking the candidate to the edge of what they know and then beyond to see how they deal with the unknown, I started asking them early on what they played with as kids (which usually got me odd looks :)). The lego/meccano/similar were much more likely to perform better than others (which were mostly video games). This came out of a discussion at a large company about what was differentiating the better candidates. It mostly correlated. 

This led to an interesting ethical question for me. 

It became apparent that an interview didn't have to take long to establish this. A good candidate would just romp through stuff and it would be an interesting mind sparring time. The not so good would labour through things. What was a good time length to try? I had one that on paper looked fantastic. I felt horrible thinking after the first few minutes that I should terminate the interview although I knew I would be wasting my and their time to continue but also that they would have wasted their time coming. I decided to use a little time to educate them into writing an appropriate CV, and why, and to learning something from the interview. These days I usually spend some time trying to educate a poor candidate as part of the interview and try to give them a number of opportunities to show themselves. 

What do others that interview do?