Candidate.

The Director of IT came by our cube area last Friday and was talking to the one guy left on the other team. He had done a couple of interviews. One of them was with a guy who wanted 'more money than I'm making!' This guy had apparently got less than half the technical questions right. 'These were simple questions! I haven't been programming for years!' the Director said, then laughed loudly, shocked by the incompetence of the applicant.

He's a pretty loud guy in general. When he's talking I get the impression that he's anxious to make sure that everyone is agreeing with him. I'd guess the theme for this discussion was - Look at how much smarter I am than everyone else.

'I asked him how a bubble sort works and he couldn't answer it', he said, as if that was a particularly germane question. Even if it was, when the Director tried to explain it to us, he got it wrong, confusing it with quicksort.

He took time, as usual, to criticize the contracting company that did most of the early work on our project, even though doing our new 're-architecture' has been worse than what we replaced and which still isn't done.

The conversation consisted of the Director standing, declaiming, gesticulating in between the rows of cubes as a couple of the other developers listened and asked questions. At one point he said he'd send us a copy of the questions he uses for interviews. I'm sure that won't happen. I have heard this several times over the past couple of years and we've never got them.

I tried to look busy and kept my eyes on my computer screen. I didn't see the point of the conversation, don't believe what he says, and, you know, I doubt if my input would be heard anyway, so I try my best to ignore this stuff. I imagine if I questioned the relevance or correctness of anything, no matter how right I was, it'd just piss him off, and really, what do I care? I just don't like listening to the guy bloviate, but, all in all, he's not, by a long shot, the worst boss I ever had.