Job Interviews: The .com bubble of the 90's vs. the Mobile Revolution.

A difference I noticed in job interviews now and the last tech boom of the late 90's is that there is far less emphasis on technical interviews. I remember interviewing during the Internet .com boom where I would face round after round of technical questions. I was also asked to give technical interview to candidates and to hit them as hard as I could to see where they would break. It seemed that was all anyone cared about. Employers wanted to get technically, the strongest candidate they could find. If you didn't break in your technical interview, you got hired on the spot. I THRIVED in this environment! I was an MS Access/VB/SQL developer back then. I specialized on Access. Over the next 10 years, I only met 1 person who knew as much about Access as I did. If it was an MS Access job, I was almost guaranteed to get it if I got the interview. I worked very hard to make sure I was the best at what I did, or at least the best that anyone would be able to find.

Fourteen years later, we are in another tech boom led by mobile. I've chosen to specialize in iOS and become the best general iOS developer out there. I've been doing this for 1.5 years now out of the 3 years the App Store and SDK has existed, written thousands of lines of code over a dozen different apps between my own apps and two mobile consulting firms. There isn't going to be anyone technically stronger in iOS than me unless they had either worked for Apple, have experience writing Mac apps, or expertise in specific areas like 3D graphics.

But the technical interview part is far smaller now. I don't need to talk for more than 15 minutes, show them a couple apps, a few hundred lines of code, and a short coding test. That's all they need see before they say, "OK, we're convinced you know how to write iOS apps. We don't need to see anymore. Let's talk about something else."

So what is something else? Well, the interview becomes more like dating at this point. First they talk about what they do. They're interested in whether or not I believe in what they are doing. For example, when I interviewed with a video game company, they spent a lot of time talking about if I liked playing video games, what kind of video games I played, and how many hours a week I spent playing video games. When I interviewed with a mobile CMS startup, the CEO spent almost two hours explaining to me what their product was and then wanted to know what I thought of it. At another interview, I spent over 1.5 hours on a programming brain teaser to test my general level of intelligence; kind of like an IQ test. Then they ask me personal questions, like what kind of hobbies I like to do, what I want to do with my life in 5 years, where I am from, how did I get here, and what I want to do with my life. I even get questions like am I a morning or night person, what do I like to eat, what hours do I like to work, what kind of place do I live, and other general lifestyle questions.

In other words, whether or not you get the job has very little to do with how qualified you are for it. It's much more about your personality and whether or not they like you. These dozen interviews over the past year have all been more like dating than going on job interviews. That has been a very odd experience for me since it never use to be this way. It is going to require me to prepare a different way. I don't need to fear that I'm going to be asked something I don't know. I know enough that I can force the technical interview to go in a direction where I am very familiar with. What seems more important today is realizing the type of people that are interviewing me, and trying to befriend them.