"Pleased to meet you, Joe," JoAnn said taking "Friendly but Professional" from her arsenal of faces and deploying it. "I'm JoAnn. I understand you're here to apply for our Associate Programmer position."

Joe squirmed a bit in his chair. These managerial types always made him uncomfortable -- although this one did look kind of friendly and professional -- and his new pin stripe suit wasn't helping matters by chafing him in an unscratchable spot. He was also having second thoughts about wearing his beautiful salmon tie. Maybe it wasn't the bold statement of individuality that he had envisioned.

"Yes. I've just completed my bachelors degree in Computer Science and I'm looking for a place to...er, work."

The "er...work" phrase was one of the expressions JoAnn had mapped into one of her hot keys. Her response was immediate and automatic. She reduced the intensity of the friendly smile by 7% and added a hint of approbation around the eyes. "We like to think that the company provides more than just work," she said. "We like to think in terms of careers and long term planning. How do you feel about that? What would you say your long range objectives are? Where would you like to be in five years? In ten years?"

Joe panicked. Was this some kind of trick question? What was this nonsense about ten years in the future? Joe wanted to be in the same place ten years from now that he wanted to be that afternoon, enjoying himself working on a systems project and having somebody actually paying him to do it! The longest range objective Joe could come up with was tipping a few beers and watching the Packers play the Bears on Sunday afternoon which was probably not what she had in mind.

"Well, I'd like to be in a place that offers me some challenging...er, work, and gives me the chance to keep learning new skills."

The second "er...work" bothered JoAnn in a strange fashion. She had to suppress the impulse to say exactly the same thing she had just said a minute before. She recovered quickly. Ok, so I asked a silly question, thought JoAnne. This guy probably doesn't have any longer range objectives than watching the Packers play the Bears on Sunday afternoon. She circled the "1" on the 1 to 10 scale for promotability, regretting the absence of negative numbers. Time to bite the bullet and ask a data processing question. She quickly went back into the armoury and glanced through her collection of faces. She selected "Serious and Interested", a face she had borrowed from Ronald Reagan, and glued it on.

"Looking at your application, I see that you wrote a compiler in college for a language called LAID," JoAnn could hardly believe what she was reading; only her steel will kept "Serious and Interested" from shattering into helpless laughter. "Could you tell me a little about it."

Joe brightened up immediately. Finally a question with some substance! And a glance his inquizator told him that she really was serious about this and interested in his answer. "Yes, it's an acronym, of course. It stands for Language for Artificial Intelligence Development. It's a 4GL based on Lisp and Smalltalk that allows AI developers to parameterize their application and generate the appropriate code blocks."

Joe noticed that a kind of glaze had come over JoAnn's eyes. It looked a little like those extra eyelids that cats have, but she still looked serious and interested so he continued. "For instance, every AI needs an extremely searchable SQL database and the interfaces are all pretty much the same, so what I did was to establish a few simple commands that..."

"Excuse me," JoAnn said. "Sorry, to interrupt, but I was wondering, did you ever do anything with accounting?"

Does that sound familiar? The management of a company and the data processing staff have a similar relationship. There's little difference between Generals and Colonels in the military and Presidents and Vice Presidents in a company. The managerial version of discipline is being a "team player", which ultimately means "do as your told and don't ask too many questions." Managerial dress is a uniform that has only a little more variation than a soldier's. On the other hand, the data processors, like the scientists, have almost a classless society (okay, there are a few different job titles but no one pays much attention to them). They pride themselves on their creativity and their knowledge, and they like to work when they want to work and do things in the way they want to do them. The managers and the data processors don't understand each other, don't have much respect for each other, and each regards the other as, at best, a necessary evil.

But all of this isn't too important as long as the managers stay in the board room and the data processors stay in the computer room. The problems occur at places where the two groups touch -- like the Human Resources person interviewing the data processing candidate. The mistake JoAnn makes is evaluating Joe with the same criteria she'd use to evaluate a managerial candidate. Joe isn't exactly a snappy dresser. That's bad if he's going to be a manager, but totally unimportant for a data processor. Joe isn't a team player. That's bad if he's going to be a manager but may actually be a virtue for a data processor. Joe doesn't want a career, he just wants a job. Very bad for a manager -- clawing their way up the corporate ladder is what keeps managers in line -- but very good for a data processor, the ones who want careers instead of jobs end up quitting the company or going into middle management positions for which they're totally unsuited. To some extent, JoAnn's evaluation techniques -- which work just fine for managerial positions -- are exactly and precisely 180 degrees wrong for evaluating data processors.

This problem has interesting consequences for project leaders looking to hire new people. I was in that position once and was ordered to use the HR department instead of doing my own interviewing. The candidates that my particular JoAnn sent me were all essentially MBAs who, somewhere along the line, had taken a college course with a title something like Cobol for Middle Managers or FORTRAN for Accountants. After rejecting three or four of these guys, I called my JoAnn and told her to start sending me the people she didn't like instead of the ones she liked. Our relationship -- already on shaky ground -- deteriorated further and I ended up snagging someone from another project within the company.

Some time after this incident, a paranoid thought occurred to me. Perhaps my managers were worried that if I did my own hiring, the company would end up with a hairy hippie employee who would refuse to wear a shirt to staff meetings. And perhaps they would have. So maybe the right way to do data processing interviews is in two stages where first the HR person attempts to filter out the rapists, mass murders, MBAs, and people who haven't bathed recently, and then passes the rest to the project leader for a technical interview. The problems with this are: first that the HR person tends to set the filter a bit too fine and eliminates good data processing candidates, and second, those pesky MBAs keep sneaking through.