Ego interview

Holy cow, today's was some interview! Yes, I've been conducting interviews for a position in our group since the past two weeks. We decided to do around 4 per week, and in the past 7-8 people that we had talks with, only 3 were face-to-face, the others being telephonic.

I never thought that I'll have to have such a session, given that I left the idea of calling myself an engineer and assuming that the ego had rested itself. Recent days at work have been *different*, however, with me even wondering whether to study further and get myself some business degree! I thought I'd given up engineering all together and had picked a "none of the above" choice when given to pick options by friends on what I am. Although, business degree is arguably not engineering even for an engineer, it would be quite technical the way I would learn it and anything technical with me will end up being engineering. I don't think I'm making any sense here, am I?

Lets get back to interviews. Fair enough, I lived up to my "Hitler of our times" image that someone tagged me couple of years back while gifting me *Mein Kampf*. I'm not saying that I'm Hitler of your times; or any time, for that matter. I haven't even read Mein Kampf! Did I get back to the interviews, really? No! Okay, I was saying that this person on telecon today started by taking our interview, instead of the other way, and ate off 40 minutes off a 60 minute call we planned. He went into all sort of questions that are generally asked or even most left unanswered at the last hire meeting. This fella went on and on in the first call itself, while a colleague and I went berserk! We got no time to question him till then. I tried to ask him out of his waterfall of enquiries politely, guiding him elsewhere, but he dragged us in again.

I'd made my decision that he's too wary & arrogant, although he did seem intelligent and smart from his resume and talk. He even had Mensa membership. But somewhere down the line, my mind got control over things and in its vengeance, hurled technical stuff across in an effort to corner, trap and ridicule him! So I did. My ego was speaking on my behalf and I came to know that it had him totally under that spell. He tried to move around questions to his benefit, but I didn't let him do that. Somewhere beneath lies an engineer in me that I thought had died, but he was not only alive, he was at his peak, not willing to take things lying. Its a sad state, but I feel that the guy on the other end of the line had an equally good attitude while getting jacked! He took it well. At one point, I told him in these words: "I'm going to tell you why the interview is going this way. You asked us a set of core questions and that tells me that details interest you. So I'm going to ask you core questions too." He was hit badly when he couldn't answer anything and leading himself to utter things such as "I haven't come across this", "Oh! thats an interesting question... I need to try it out", "I haven't gone this deep", "I'm not sure", etc. I felt good, I'm not going to lie about that! I'm equally sure that he hasn't had such a bad interview in his life, yet. My only hope is that, after this day, he's convinced enough to play his ego down and run his arrogance low, henceforth.

Well, I'm glad, we ended the call with the fella saying: "that call was quite insightful". I was thinking: "It better be".