While you were still working over here, I think I had mentioned wanting to make a portfolio… But when I started on it, I just couldn’t think of anything good to include.

I guess I’ll start on my portfolio today. No time like the present, eh?

Thanks for the feedback.

Regularly involved with IT infrastructure changes and upgrades related to software development, database management, development and security, systems integration, hardware issues, network issues, scheduling of major upgrade installations, and technology acquisition.

Developed and created DIGDUG (you’ll have to elaborate more on what that is/does)

Developed and created Fax viewer for customer service/billing departments allowing quick retrieval, reviewing and storage of order faxes.

Developed multiple Functions, views, and stored procedures allowing the company to efficiently meet its highly custom reporting needs.

Modified ActSoft’s Comet Tracker application to allow for Order forwarding between multiple phones utilizing custom stored procedures and DTS Jobs.

Communicated with 3rd party software developers to resolve software integration and development issues.

Assisted Jr. Developers in troubleshooting and provided guidance on standard IT practices.

The way I see it, you really are the core of the IT department there. You are the one who truly understands the technology employed there and any issues regarding its improvements and/or additions.

You really need to walk around that place with a notepad, or dig through the network and say “I did that” or “I helped implement that”, you will be surprised at your list. It easy to shrug off things that you consider simple but others may see as complicated and what they are looking for in someone they want to hire.

Yeah drinks sound good. I still work over in the Tampa area around the Airport so let me know.

Haha.

Anyhow, the training stuff is a big one, for sure. I was talking about that with Stu today. He’s got a potential job lined up that is offering him some decent training on new/current technologies. He’s got to put up with sort of a low-end position initially, but since they offered to pay for training, cert’s, etc., I thought it sounded like it would be good for him.

Speaking of which… you, me, and Stu should go out of of these days for drinks.

Knowing what I know now, one of the questions I ask is “How much training do your people get?” If the answer is none to very little, I don’t want to work there. I’m not up for some company sucking up my skill and knowledge without getting some in return. Otherwise, I’ll be worthless in no time. There is a good saying I saw somewhere recently, I think a training flyer or something, but it read “The only thing worse than training good employees and losing
them is NOT training your employees and keeping them.”

The other question I ask is, “Do you enjoy coming to work here, and do you think your employee’s feel the same?” This kind threw one interviewer off. They actually had to think about it for a couple of seconds, and the answer was “Yeah, I guess so”. Wow, sounds like some place I’d love to be.

Yeah, there are a lot of unskilled people out there. But at the same time, the more experienced developers should be taking the newbies under their wings and teaching them. I did that in my other career. Otherwise you just end up going behind them and cleaning up their mess or picking up their slack anyways… or in that case getting killed. It may have take a little extra time the first couple of times, but once they got it, the payoff far exceeded the investment.

Yeah I know, there are still some dolts out there that will just never get it. Hopefully you dont end up hiring one of them and wasting your time.

But… yeah… I agree. What’s crazy is, I’m starting to believe what you told me once about how unskilled folks actually are at most other companies.

You create an application which takes in multiple user entered values, and queries a database. What is a method you could use to prevent SQL Injection attacks.

Describe the concept of Object Oriented Programming

What is polymorphism

You have multiple textboxes on an HTML page, and you need to grab the values from them and store them in a single variable, what is a method of accomplishing this.

Most of the questions I recall being asked were more conceptual, and the interviewer was more interested in the method I would use to accomplish the task rather than spitting out syntactically correct lines of code.

I would use experiences from your current or past projects. What problems did you run into, and how did you solve them? Ask the person how they might solve them, or what they would do in a similar situation.

Technical ability is part of what you’re looking for, so is resourcefulness, and personality. The person might be able to write code to launch and land the space shuttle, but if they have zero personality, or don’t know what to do when they get stuck, what’s the point?

Questions in which the person asked to explain what they did or how they accomplished a task reveals a lot more about the person you may not get from asking questions like “How do you connect to SQL Server in VB.Net”