When talking about interviews, most programmers are interested in the technical interview. And why not? It’s what we know. We think that if we can solve a problem on a whiteboard, we should get the job. Meritocracy for the win! But at most companies, it really doesn’t work like that. The management in charge of the programmers will always have the last say in whether you’re hired or not. What they want to know is, “Can this person do this job?

The call came in around 3:00 PM and I ran outside to take it in private. The call was from the start-up in Michigan that I had been interviewing with for three weeks and they had finally made a decision. They were going with someone else. I was more than a little surprised. Things had been going great and we were already talking about future strategies and how I could get them to where they needed to go.