Tuesday March 01, 2005

Parking on the pavements

I really get annoyed when people park on the pavements. We have fairly wide pavements in the village and people decide their car is safer ( for it ) if the car occupies some or all of the pavement. There is a blind man in the village and I am sure he enjoys negotiating his way around an uneeded obstacle. The other side effect is as the road is not so blocked people then try and drive through the enlarged gap when a vehicle is coming the other way instead of stopping. This can cause other problems...

At Binfield a village I drive through every day a pedestrian path has been widened to make it a cycle path as well. Of course people find this new tarmaced area a great place to park their cars, despite clear marking indicating its intended use...

Student interviews

It is that time of the year again. Student interviews. Through the whole process I hope we are fair to the candidates. For five jobs I like to start with twelve candidates. If we do not end up with five students we want we re-advertise. The first stage is a telephone interview. I am always present. I phone the student up, introduce myself and the other two people to the candidate. I talk about the job and what it entails and what sort of work we do in Sun.I then tell the candidate the following salient points:

You are going to be asked a series of technical questions. If you clearly do not know nothing about the subject do not be surprised if we move onto another subject. We are not here to stress you out. We just want to understand the breadth of your knowledge.

Take your time in answering the question. Do not say "I have no idea" as soon as you hear the question. Think about it in relation to the previous question. Give your brain time to come up with the answer.

Give us short answers, if we want more details we will ask you for more information.

Our current students usually take part in the the interviewers if they want too. That can also be useful (for both the candidate and us)

If the candidate is successful we ask them to come and meet us. This will be with me and my full time lab engineer. We ask them a load of situation analysis questions. Eg you are faced with this situation what would YOU do. I stress the point there are no right answers here, everyone answers the questions differently. Halfway through this interview we give them a lab tour. A current student does that. How they react and what questions they ask is part of the overall picture we get of them. We also ask in the second half of the interview to tell us what they have learned about a key piece of Sun technology. In the past we have asked the to read up on Sunrays when we invite them for the interview. We do not expect them to be experts but to have learnt the buzz words, the advantages and potential issues the technology gives them.

The whole process is very tiring. We tell the candidates at the face to face that we will take notes to remind us of what they say , it is only fair to ensure we do so in case we forget how well people answered our questions.