Business Casual

My current employer has an open position for a SR Help Desk Analyst and has interviewed potential candidates for the last few weeks. I've been sitting in on some of these interviews as the technical question guy since the ideal candidate needs to possess a decent understanding of both SQL and Visual Basic.

However, I'm just amazed at how bad some people perform on these interviews. If you're coming into a job where your main functions are SQL and VB, I have some expectations that you can answer some basic questions about the two. And yet, by my second questions, I know that these people have no business interviewing for this position.

And it's not like I'm asking difficult questions during the interviews. I'm batting 0% on candidates being able to write a simple INNER JOIN statement for me. How can you expect to get a SQL job if you can't write the syntax for a join? And when the candidates can't get the question right, they always fall back to some lame excuse like the ones listed below.

"I do this all the time, but I'm drawing a blank right now." - No, you don't do this all the time. If you did, you would know the answer.

"I haven't done any SQL coding for a couple of years now." - And it didn't occur to you that it might be beneficial to brush up on your SQL knowledge before the interview?

"I know what to do, but I would need to consult my reference sources." - (Paraphrased: I would need to come and ask you how to do everything.)

If anything, the interviews give me a boost of confidence of my own coding abilities. And that's about all the positive encouragement I can give them except that they may provide future inspiration for Business Casual comics.

I'm thinking of tinkering with the way that the comic itself looks. Now that I'm trying to keep all of the word balloons inside the individual comic frames, I'm continually reworking my dialog to make the words fit into the drawings in a somewhat logical manner. Since I have a lot of unused whitespace around the date, copyright, and web address, I figured I would try to increase the vertical size of the frames.

So what does this mean exactly for ye olde Business Casual? Not much really. You'll see a bigger picture sometimes, and I won't have to cram the contents of the speech bubbles so much because I'll have more room at the top. In the big picture, however, it may lead to a better comic. And we all want that....don't we?