Hiring people is an interesting process. You meet lots of people, many smart, some strange. Today something happened on a phone interview that has never happened before.

I had scheduled a phone interview with a candidate for this afternoon. I called him at the time we agreed on and I went into most of my standard questions about building high-performance applications, relational databases, Java, and design principles. He wasn’t doing too well on many of them and he just said “I don’t know” on a bunch.

At that point, I figured he might be light on experience but could be really smart, so I gave him one of my standard puzzle questions. I asked the question, he asked for clarification and then I waited. About a minute later, I heard a click and the line dropped. He actually hung up on me!

That’s a first. It sure made it easy to tell him that he wouldn’t work out though!