Hey, Bryan, “What is polymorphism?”

I took an interview last Friday at a Downtown-Los Angeles-based, famous-label, high-fashion, after-market online retailer for what I thought was a mid-to-low-level PHP position. Yes, folks I’m not picky. This job market is brutal. I’m pushing for a senior .NET spot—or a low-level PHP spot. After this interview, I realized I met with a serious, professional person looking for a very experienced PHP/Linux person.

The person that interviewed me took extensive notes while I was talking—even when he handed out sheets of paper with technical questions on them that require written answers he wrote down my answers. This is very, very wise. First of all, my handwriting—especially during interviews—is terrible. And, most importantly, the interviewer needs to remember in detail—their detail—about who is sitting in front of them as they interview many, many candidates. This job market is brutal.

There are two—okay three—mistakes that I remember from that Friday interview:

• I failed to translate INNER JOIN syntax into my favorite join syntax using the = operator (this is the second interview that required knowing this rather verbose form); I also, by the way, cannot tell you what outer joins do—I have not used them in so long…
• I failed to sketch out how the Zend Framework expects you to use Zend_Db for a model. Right now my personal style bypasses Zend_Db and uses XML versions of associative arrays of database sets so they can be processed by XSLT. I get the feeling that the interviewer thinks I’m bullshitting when I mention this alternative—this feeling pisses me off by the way.
• I failed to answer correctly the direct, straight-forward question, “What is polymorphism?”It says quite clearly in the Wikipedia.org article on polymorphism that, “Polymorphism is not the same as method overloading or method overriding.” But this is exactly what I did in the interview: I confused method overloading with polymorphism. Polymorphism is the theoretical bedrock on which interface-based programming stands and there is no excuse for me not knowing that last Friday (even though most of came to know polymorphism though inheritance which is not fashionable these days). Did I mention that this is a brutal job market? Missing this one question certainly means I don’t get the job. I would not hire me for missing this one—because this question precisely assesses the theoretical core of the candidate.

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