When I was on the MIS PhD faculty for the School of Business at UWM, I wrote some great questions, but I was only eligible to sit on one exam, the second attempt by CK, who was really an accountant but they didn't have an accounting PhD option so he targeted an MIS PhD. He was well-liked by the 4 senior/tenured faculty. Not to bitch about my colleagues, but their questions were highly predictable, e.g., GH would give a simulation number-crunching problem (which in my opinion was not a real PhD exam question). The other faculty loved my questions but weren't about to give up their question for one of mine, so I was held to a single question. (I seem to recall they would throw out one question's results, plus they would toss out the high and low grade in computing a response--so I wasn't guaranteed the student would be evaluated on my equation or even my own evaluation would go into computing the score). But I gave open-ended questions; there weren't necessarily "right" answers. I was more interested in the student showing some knowledge about key articles on the topic, how to operationalize variables, statistical tests/power in evaluating hypotheses. Much like Musk, I was more interested in how detailed and articulate the student was in responding to the question. I remember in the case of CK, he had taken and failed his first attempt of up to 2, and I was not part of that attempt. The faculty had cautioned him to skip the next scheduled exam (each semester) because he wasn't ready and he was out on a second failure. CK came to my office to brown-nose me, try to figure out what I might ask; he pointed out that he had read all my journal articles. (Not to diminish my own work, but I was working more in the human factors area of MIS, then a fairly small niche of the discipline.) His response to my question would prove to be disappointing and mediocre at best. He failed the exam in totality, not surprising. What my senior colleagues did next violated professional ethics, beyond the scope of this post but I've discussed it in one or 2 past posts.
As a professor, I gave tests better than any other professor I know, In part, that was because I was very familiar with the education and applied psychology literature, questionnaire design, etc. I thoroughly sampled test questions over material, and I prided myself on being able to ask the same question 5 or 6 different ways. It was uncanny how results seemed to follow the same pattern across exams. I've often joked how my UH students (I was a teaching fellow, teaching a couple of classes each semester) described my exams; one student described them as a form of lobotomy; other students rated them by how many beers it took to forget them. I remember one former student who called them his first "real" college exams at UH. I was meticulous over grading; I would rank-order essay-type question responses to ensure consistent grading. I had a lot of negative student feedback during my college teaching career, but almost no one argued my tests or grading were unfair.
My Mom has always been skeptical I could be effective in the classroom because I had been a standout achiever, at least since junior high. (My memories of primary school are sketchy, because I often found it boring and sometimes got up and walked around class.) I've mentioned that my high school advised me to graduate in 3 years because they couldn't teach to my level; I also graduated college in in 3 years. But, no, I never had unrealistic expectations; for example, I never gave out a computer assignment I couldn't do myself in less than 30 minutes and gave them up to 3 weeks. I came to lecture with typed, detailed lecture notes. (I rarely needed to refer to them; I was always articulate in lecture and just the effort in organizing my lecture helped cement the content.) I worked hard at organization. I was able to detect deficiencies like when my UTEP database students did not know basic data structures (prerequisite course) and I immediately started teaching data structures (two courses for the price of one; students complained, of course). Unlike my colleagues, I had higher expectations of student performance and I achieved better results (that's not how colleges rate professors, which is typically subjective, single-item questions. Unfortunately, some students who don't like doing more in class beyond punching a job ticket see it as a way of exacting revenge against a tougher professor. That's why I repeatedly quote one of my disgruntled former UWM students who wrote, "I learned more in Dr. Guillemette's class than any other class here, but he deserves none of the credit because I did it all myself." Welcome to college, junior. What I care about is you learned something in my class. I'm not here to be your drinking buddy. By the way, I rarely failed students; usually failing students dropped the class early on.
For some odd reason, I've only conducted tech screens a few times over the past 25 years. I've never had to resort to gotcha type interviews or trick questions that I've experienced over the years. I've sometimes mentioned a question out of left field when interviewing for a USPTO contractor position. I later asked my new DBA colleague where that question came from. He shrugged his shoulders and said he had been researching that topic for 2 weeks and had gotten nowhere; he felt there was nothing to lose by asking me. I don't do demoralizing crap like that. This may seem to be similar in nature to what Musk or I discussed above, but this was a highly specialized problem which I had never encountered. To be sure, some people have solved very difficult problems thrown under time constraints. But it wasn't relevant in assessing my DBA experience and fitness for the position; it was indulgent and self-serving.
It's possible but improbable that I'll start my own company and hire my own staff. But what would I look for? Consider the following attributes:
- a hard work ethic
- a creative mind
- a track record of productivity
- personal integrity
- commitment to the user/client/customer, excellence and business objectives
- articulate verbal, written communication skills
- a positive attitude
- direct, blunt communication, not a yes man
- proactive activities; early feedback on issues to management bearing on objectives
- flexible, adaptive disposition; ongoing commitment to learning new concepts
- the ability to cope with change and challenges, to set priorities
- a self-starter, needing minimal supervision, minimal time to productive work
This is an abridged listing and reflects my own criteria. There are ways to discuss this in the context of one's personal experience. To give a couple of examples from my own experience:
- when I worked for Oracle Consulting, I went to a southwestern state capital and turned around a failing project where two senior predecessors had been walked off over the first 3 weeks, winning a "Nifty Fifty" award. In another case I took a 6-month fixed-bid contract project for a Milwaukee suburb county which was 2 months behind schedule and beat the due date. (The client pushed for an extra week of testing.)
- when I worked for a company later acquired by Equifax, I processed all data loads within 48 hours in a department where some processes had taken a week or more to process and some data loads were 6 months or longer backlogged.
- when working as the corporate DBA for a computer chip testing subsidiary, I automated a concurrent program which included integrating new Japanese price lists (including data cleaning) within 2-3 hours to production versus the earlier manual process between marketing and a system analyst which had taken several days.
- I often concurrently held multiple roles, including Oracle DBA, Oracle Applications system administrator, Unix server administration, and Oracle development. I've devised my own database server alerts. I've diagnosed and repaired several hardware issues.I had to devise a workaround for an Oracle firmware security issue until the firmware patch was published. I've fixed Y2K compliance issues for undocumented reports.
I could go on. This is not a brag sheet but serves to exemplify the kinds of things to discuss with recruiters and hiring managers.
I may broaden these concepts to discuss how to evaluate politicians in a future post.
