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Conducting the J2EE Job Interview IT Manager Guide for J2EE with Interview Questions IT Job Interview series

Offering accumulated observations of interviews with hundreds of job candidates, these books provide useful insights into which characteristics make a good IT professional. These handy guides each have a complete set of job interview questions and provide a practical method for accurately assessing the technical abilities of job candidates. The personality characteristics of successful IT professionals are listed and tips for identifying candidates with the right demeanor are included. Methods for evaluating academic and work histories are described as well.

User Ratings and Reviews

5 Stars Excellent Service
The book was delivered on time. The book is in excellent shape, other then couple of pencil marks it was like new. Great buy for the price.

4 Stars Very nice Q/A section
I am a manager (and still developing, however as little as possible) for a group of developers working with Oracle Apps 11i and a custom integrated web application for our sales and manufacturing department. I own both the Java and the J2EE version of this book and will be cross posting my comments to both of them. The comments below are both mine and senior members of my staff that have gone through both books.

Both books contain very similar information with regards to the interview process – proper dress code when showing up for an interview, assessing job skills, the values of certification and formal education requirements.

The heart of both the Java and J2EE books, however, is the Q/A section. Both are filled with well written and insightful questions that could be used for many J2EE or Java candidate positions.

With regards to the J2EE book, I feel that there was good coverage on Servlets, JSP, JDBC and JMS, however, I would have liked to seen more (actually any) questions on Struts, DBO and Web Services.

Generally speaking, both books are well worth the $$$ and I was very impressed by the quality of the Q/A section. Hopefully a newer version of this book will address Struts and Web Services.

1 Star A really bad book …
The author appears to have no serious managerial experience: he seems to be a self-employed DBA. And it shows. Bigtime.

The model candidate, according to the author, would appear to be a conformist left-brained banking clerk. I have worked with and hired developers with a varied range of dress habits, personal manners, backgrounds and education. Good developers come in all sorts of shapes, sizes and colors. The best programmer I ever worked with never had a high-school education. Following this book’s guidelines for assessing candidates’ personal qualities would have excluded 2/3 of the best developers I know.

It’s riddled with prejudice: “the female job applicant with three children less than five years of age may not be appropriate for an IT position that requires long hours on evenings or weekends.” But it would be OK for a man with three such children to neglect them? And what does it say about a company and management which cannot organize projects without expecting excessive overtime?

The author appears to have no idea of the existence of employment legislation, anti-discrimination law, management techniques or how to motivate people. One has the impression that the recommendations would be more appropriate for a correctional facility or a kindergarten school than a twenty-first century development shop.

The technical questions reveal immaturity and inexperience. Design abilities are far more important to the fate of a project than technical minutiae. Yet no questions are included that would enable a manager to distinguish someone who really understands good principles of object oriented design. Just asking questions about patterns that a trained parrot could answer is hopelessly inadequate.

The technical questions are about half the book. But they are repetitious, the ‘answers’ are often too specific – one ‘right’ answer when several alternatives are equally appropriate. Some are obscure and totally academic: ‘What is the Java Remote Method Protocol(JRMP)?’. Who cares? JRMP goes on completely under the covers and a developer has no need to know even of its existence. Some questions are plain wrong: ‘What are the two transport protocols used by J2EE web-based client applications?’. ‘HTTP and HTTPS transport protocols’ comes the answer. First, HTTP is not a transport protocol but an application level protocol. Second, there is no HTTPS protocol: HTTPS is a URI scheme which is used to indicate that HTTP will be tunneled through secure sockets.

By the time the candidate has been asked Non-Technical Questions 8 (’If you were a vegetable, which vegetable would you be?’) and 9 (’Describe the month of June’), any sensible candidate will already be asking themselves Non-Technical Question 10: ‘Why do you want to work here?’

2 Stars Useless advice
Sometimes I wonder if the author’s advice is very biased towards their own knowledge of the technology and qualifications. I mean, come on, proper dress code???, education in the ivy league schools???

1. Dress code is the responsibility of each employer, some larger corporations might adhere to a stricter dress code, some smaller ones (especially technology companies) could care less if you wear jeans to work, as long as you are knowledgeable and productive.

2. College degree. I disagree with the statement that “You **must** possess a certification and/or degree. You truly can’t make such hard qualifying statements, since most IT jobs in the industry require degree or equivalent experience. I mean, come on, I know plenty of great developers who didn’t finish college, but have many years of Enterprise Application Development under their belt. What if you are an industry acknowledged expert, book author, and have many years of experience, do you disqualify that candidate if they don’t have a formal degree?

Basically I almost felt like the author is a psychology expert (which half of this book is dedicated to), vs. sticking strictly to technical questions and qualifications. Does the author also have a **degree** if psychology? Otherwise based in his statements, he’s definitely not qualified to make such recommendations.

1 Star its a book for time pass
50% of book is with general topics, other than J2EE

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