Wednesday, February 15, 2006

Interviewing UI Designers

Since we are in the process of building a team of UI designers at work, I have been assigned the task of conducting interviews to decide on potential candidates. Today, I held my first few rounds of interviews. Until today, I have never realized how entertaining an interview can be.


Me: So, on a scale of 1 to 10, how do you rate your CSS skills?
She: 6, at least. (smile)
Me: Nice. 6 is not bad. So, what does CSS stand for?
She: Cascading Style Sheets
Me: Ok. Why are they called 'cascading' style sheets?
She: Because you can cascade it onto multiple pages.
Me: So, I need to write a JavaScript snippet that can read a user's inputs in a form, prepare a text file, and save it on the user's desktop. Can I do this using JavaScript?
Him: Sure!
Me: (understandably surprised) Can you show me the code?
Him: Sure! (starts scribbling something down, but gets stuck)
Me: (probing) Are you sure this can be done using JavaScript again?
Him: Yeah, I'm pretty sure.
Me: Have you seen any examples of this before?
Him: Yeah. We have used similar things in our previous organization.
Me: How do I add a style sheet to my HTML document?
Him: Simple. You click on 'Insert' on the menu bar, and click on "Style sheet".
Me: No, I meant by hand-coding in markup
Him: Yeah. You can do it that way too.
Me: Yeah, that's what I'm asking. How do you do it?
Him: You should use the right tag for that purpose.
Me: Which is the right tag for this purpose?
Him: (thinks for some time, but can't come up with anything)
Me: (trying to help him out) Are you familiar with the link and style tags? What do they do?
Him: You use the style tag for attaching style sheets, and the link tag for creating links.
Me: Allright, how good are you at JavaScript?
She: Very good.
Me: That's quite a relief. So, what is the DOM?
She: (thinks for some time) I'm not really sure. I've heard that for the first time.
Me: Is JavaScript an Object Oriented language, or is it a Procedural language? Or is it some weird mix of both? Or is it neither?
Him: I did not understand the question. Could you please tell me what is 'Object Oriented'?
Me: So, about image editing, when would you use the GIF format, and when would you use the JPG format?
She: I'll use the GIF format for making animations, and the JPG for static images.
Me: I meant static images itself. Which format will you use, and on what basis will you decide?
She: Static images? I'll use the JPG format.

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