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First Job: Interview - Communications (4)

本文发表在 rolia.net 枫下论坛Very often interviewers interrupt candidates in mid-sentence and move on to the next question. Sometimes, they do so after only a couple of words. Why? Because the candidates already hit the point.

The "point" is the most important thing in communications. You often hear people say "I got your point", "you missed the point", "what's your point". The most common problem in communications is not able to "get the point across" - they understand everything you say, but they still don't understand you.

One reason why we couldn't "get our point across" is rambling: giving too much details, or straying into totally unrelated topics. As a result, our point gets crowded out.

The good news is that this problem is easy to fix. We just have to realize the importance of "being concise and to the point". Most people don't have the patience to listen to ramblings. Even if they're patient, they may not be able to pick up our point from all the unimportant details.

Recently, I helped someone to find a job after she was laid off. One thing I helped her was email. At the beginning, I had to edit her emails so much that I often ended up rewriting the while thing. Something I could explain in one sentence, she had to use five. I told her that people get tons of emails at work and they could easily miss your point buried in a long email. Worse, they judge you to be a bad communicator and pick someone else for the job. She got my point and started to write shorter emails. After a couple of weeks, I didn't have to change her email very much.

Another reason why we couldn't "get our point across" is that we simply don't know the "point". This problem is harder to fix. Recently, after reading my previous post on communications, someone commented that he often had a hard time explaining technical ideas to other people. As a result, he lost some good opportunities. In my opinion, his problem could be that he doesn't understand the ideas deeply enough himself. Even though he knows a lot of facts, he isn't able to see the essence of the matter. As a result, all he could do is to recite these facts. And his audience doesn't have any "point" to get, only a lot of facts.

I did many mock interviews with the person I helped recently with job search. She had this problem often. For example, once I asked her to explain "Web Service". She talked about SOAP, WSDL, UDDI, and about the Web Services projects she worked on. A lot of facts. However, someone new to "Web Service" would still not know what exactly a "Web Service" is after listening to her. She couldn't help him because she actually doesn't know the answer herself, despite her knowledge and experience on the subject. If she had told him that a "Web Service" is simply "RPC over XML", an experienced programmer would "get the point" right away. The rest, is merely detail.

The ability to grasp the essence of a matter is very important in communications. Years ago, I applied for a Java EJB job after merely reading a book on EJB. The guy who interviewed me told my manager that he'd never seen anyone who understood EJB so deeply. I don't know exactly how I impressed him, but I remember one thing I said in the interview: an Entity Bean is a row in a database table. To me, this is the essence of Entity Beans. A lot of pages in that book distilled into this one sentence. And this one sentence might have earned me that job.

If you don't have the ability to grasp the essence of a matter, you may be able to acquire it by practice. Try to summarize a paragraph in one sentence. Then a chapter. Then a book. Or to summarize a technology in one sentence. Or a person. Or a city. If you can't, it probably means you haven't got to the core of the matter. You need to think more about it. Or read more. Or dream a little.

People often say that it's nearly impossible to land a job through published ads. There're probably 200 people fighting for one job, they'd say. Or even 1000. I always dismiss this type of thinking as pessimists' poison. If you can explain everything in a sentence or two, you should easily beat most of these 200 people, or 1000. Here's a good example.

The other day, I read an answer on the web to the question "what is Struts"? The guy used 3 long paragraphs yet he still didn't hit the key points. Here's the first paragraph: "The core of the Struts framework is a flexible control layer based on standard technologies like Java Servlets, JavaBeans, ResourceBundles, and XML, as well as various Jakarta Commons packages. Struts encourages application architectures based on the Model 2 approach, a variation of the classic Model-View-Controller (MVC) design paradigm." If you're interested in the other two paragraphs, here's the link: http://www.allapplabs.com/interview_questions/struts_interview_questions.htm.

I would answer the question this way: "Struts is a Java framework for building web applications; we use Struts Action classes to process web requests; we use Struts tags to compose web pages; we use Struts ActionForms to store and validate user input."

In a few short sentences, I explained key facts about Struts: Action classes, ActionForms and a tag library. With 5 times as many words, the web guy failed to mention either of these. I showed the interviewer that I'm experienced in Struts; the web guy, however, only showed that he memorized a lot of buzz words. He either didn't have much experience in Struts or didn't think much for an answer.

I'll conclude this post with a quiz. Someone was asked this question in an interview: "I need to test a method in a class. The method calls a service which takes 5 minutes to finish. How should I write the test?" What's the best answer in 2 or 3 words which might lead the interviewer to move on to the next question?

------ to be continued ------更多精彩文章及讨论,请光临枫下论坛 rolia.net
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  • 工作学习 / 事业与工作 / First Job: Interview - Communications (4)
    • 鼎一下
      • 谢一下。
    • 再鼎一下
    • Great!!
    • very good post. can't agree with you more on getting the essence of a concept. more..
      by professional, I am a BA, so a lot of time I spent time defining a concept, a problem. Getting the essence is critical in communication. The best way of defining something is (in my opinion) A is kind of B with some specific attributes or fact of A. B is either an analogy used or a super type of A. Ask yourself this question, what is A, is it kind of something else or does it look like something else? to illustrate your idea, give some examples or even non-examples.

      recommended reading: a book called Made to Stick, it talks about the SUCCESS principles, Simple, Unexpected, Concrete Concise, Emotion, Specific and Story.

      I enjoy your posts, keep posting good stuff:)
    • 跟鼎。 your quiz is not clear, you want to test the method, or the service? :D
      • It is clear. This is a real interview question. The candidate failed the question but still got an offer.
        • 那估计我也要fail了。 我很可能会test method without service. :( 早知道你会Struts就问你了。害我看了几天tutorial。
          • How do you test without service? 这不是 trick 题。只要你平常重视写 test,你肯定遇到过类似情况,the interviewer 不过是 test 你的经验。我最看不起 trick 题。我觉得平平常常,思路清晰的人,比能做 Amazon 的 trick 题的人,会是更好的programmer。
            • Use "mocked" services -- i.e. replace service calls with simulated output? BTW, I wouldn't consider the Amazon horse racing problem (if that's what you refered to) a "trick" -- as all it requires is"思路清晰".
              • In comparison, I would consider "how do you test the method" trickier, as it's such an ambigious question -- with no well-defined intent.
                • Your answer is right. I don't think the question is ambiguous. I got the answer right away when she asked me. I didn't have any doubt. That's probably because I'm a simple minded person myself.
                  • Was the answer verified? Maybe you and I missed it -- and yet are enjoying ourselves without knowing the truth. :-)
                    • Unverified. It'd be funny if I call up the guy and ask him.
            • Plus, why do you think those "能做 Amazon 的 trick 题的人" couldn't be "平平常常,思路清晰", and had to be worse programmers?
              • Because people who're fond of trick or "horse racing" type of questions tend to favor complexity over simplicity. I have worked with this type of person before.
                • But the key of the question was precisely simplicity with clear mind. Remember whoever trying to leverage "heap sort", "天平秤12球问题", or unnecessarily associate it with "coding", "algorithm" didn't really get it.
                  • 你也许有道理,但我的观点仍然是:让我选热衷于智力测验的聪明人,或不在乎智力测验的平常人,我会毫不犹豫地选后者。
                    • You do have a point. Nonetheless, "*能做* Amazon 的 trick 题的人" is not necessarily equivalent to "*热衷于*智力测验的人" though.
                      • You could be right. I'm not extreme.
                • I think people who are fond of buzz words (such as design patterns by their names instead of spirit) tend to favor unnecessary complexity.
                  • You do have a point. I have seen such cases.