@dfox - Idea for weekly rant - worst candidate that showed up to a job interview.

Had a solid resume, claimed to be a Java king, top notch. First question after he sat down: How to create a thread-safe singleton in Java using double-checked locking?

Guy didn't know the answer. - NEXT!

Good idea, there is always the overly confident ones that fall first.

@nblackburn I've had 19 candidates so far of whom 19 sold their skills like they were playing at champions league level and basically were amateurs.. frustrating! Hopefully they develop the skills to do some self reflection.

@YoungWebRebelz I admire their confidence, something i lack completely.

I don't get why so many devs see shame in admitting they have areas of their language to learn. Like guys, they're gonna know when you get to the interview and your cv says you helped develop Facebook, but also lists HTML as a language...

@nblackburn At this point I'm just considering ditching the request for a resume. I'd rather see their GitHub profiles from now on to see what they've actually spent their time on.

Confidence is a skill you can train, takes a lot of time and determination.

Try to teach yourself how to pick up and defeat the negative self-talk which can destroy your confidence, you'll manage, I believe you can achieve anything you set your mind to :)

@magis Exactly. Personally I'd hire someone who knows the fields he/she can improve over someone who's overconfident and kind of 'lies' about skills he/she obviously lacks.

@YoungWebRebelz You certainly can, thanks :)

@YoungWebRebelz so if a candidate came to you with their cv and all checked out, and then you ask them a more advanced question than they have experience in. Would you (as an interviewer) be more impressed if they took a stab at it and pushed themselves to find an answer, or if they held their hands up and said I don't know that yet, but I'm more than willing to learn it?

@magis I'd rather have them try and be totally wrong then to see them ditch my answer and say they don't know. Those who try at least have the balls and courage to push their skills :)

@magis The best answer to my Java question was; I'm not going to create a singleton. Using global state is a bad design. That nailed it :)

May I know the answer to the question you asked this "worst candidate" person?

Just define the singleton as a static field in a separate class. The semantics of Java guarantee that the field will not be initialized until the field is referenced, and that any thread which accesses the field will see all of the writes resulting from initializing that field.
source (and some very good reading) http://cs.umd.edu/~pugh/java/...
<3 my java :)

@mags24 You're hired ;)

So if i dont know that, it means i am a bad developer?