A few years ago, I worked for a small internet company and was a successful dot com millionaire. Then the confounded Italians went and devalued the Lira. We spent (wasted) lots of time interviewing Oracle developers. Interviewing was time consuming and we had a fairly rapid turnover of people with varying technical abilities and personality disorders. After a while, we decided to set a short technical test in an effort to save time and improve the quality of the technical people we hired. ...

I once sat on an interview panel. Each interviewer would briefly summarise the strengths and weaknesses of each candidate and a decision would be made by consensus. However, for one candidate, the first interviewer simply said ‘No’. ‘OK David. Thank you. John, anything to add to that ?’ John: ‘Absolutely no.’ And that was the end of that.

Doug Burns tells of an unusual company with an unusual interviewing technique that reminded me of some interviewing anecdotes. After one year in IT, I had money in my pocket, no more studies and I was keen, enthusiastic and motivated. Consequently, I was invited on the ‘milk round’ to interview prospective graduates in Scotland. Flying in an aeroplane, staying in a posh hotel, eating food, drinking beer and not having to pay for any of it motivated me even more. ...

A couple of messages to the kind person who accidentally took my Palm Vx from the safety of its docking cradle. Clearly, like me, you can resist everything but temptation. You can also have the mains charger, cradle, spare stylus and a screen protector. I may even have the original box and instructions somewhere. This will help to increase the resale value on eBay. Just look under Brightside, N and give me a call. You will find that I am a very understanding, forgiving type. ...

Just noticed that those nice people at Wordpress.com have added aggregated statistics over 7 and 30 days. A software company that actually listens to their users and ' eats their own dog food’. Interesting concept but I don’t think it will ever take off.