Behavioral interviewing

As I previously mentioned I'm in the process of looking at a couple of other consulting firms. I've had some phone conversations and have some in person interviews coming up as well. One of these firms I'm exploring is big on behavioral interviewing, a style that is based on the assertion that the most accurate predictor of future performance is past performance in a similar situation.

I've been on both sides of the behavioral interviewing fence before, so I'm pretty familiar with them. But because its been a bit of time since I've been the one being interviewed, I decided that I'd brush up by reviewing some basic behavioral interview questions and thinking through what examples I'd use.

As I was reviewing lists of questions, I found myself thinking how applicable a lot of these questions would be to WoW. I'm not sure what was more surprising, the fact that WoW has so many commonalities with a work setting or the fact that my mind went to relating these interview questions to WoW.

Anyways, need some good questions for your next guild application? Some of these I kept in there because I could give a really really funny WoW related answer to them. Hmmm maybe I should answer some these questions myself in a future post...

1. What are your short term and long term goals? How did you develop these goals?
2. How would you define "success"?
3. What performance standards do you have for yourself?
4. How do you manage and schedule your time?
5. Describe a situation that required you to do a number of things at the same time. How did you handle it? What was the result?
6. How do you assign priorities?
7. What has been your biggest disappointment or failure? What happened and what did you do?
8. What is the most competitive situation you have experienced? How did you handle it? What was the result?
9. Describe a major change that you had to deal with. How did you adapt to this change?
10. Describe a time when you were able to effectively communicate a difficult or unpleasant idea.
11. Give me an example of a time when you were able to successfully communicate with another person, even when that individual may not have personally liked you.
12. What have you done in past situations to contribute toward a teamwork environment?
13. Tell us about some demanding situations in which you managed to remain calm and composed.
14. Describe a situation in which you were able to positively influence the actions of others in a desired direction.
15. Tell us about a time when you had to convince someone in authority about your ideas. How did it work out?
16. When is the last time you had a disagreement with a peer? How did you resolve the situation?
17. Describe a situation where you had a conflict with another individual, and how you dealt with it. What was the outcome? How do you feel about it?
18. What was the most stressful situation you have faced? How did you deal with it?
19. What is the difficult part of being a member, not leader, of a team? How did you handle this?

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Lich King isn't anything...

...compared to kids! Yes, kids.

Let me explain. So about a month ago we had a situation where one of our folks was hacked because he had to temporarily take off the authenticator tied to his account. Why? Well, his son flushed his authenticator down the toilet.

Last night, another of our folks lets us know that her son was playing with her iPhone and continuously entered the wrong password, thus locking her out and requiring a reset. Because the authenticator she uses is on her iPhone, she had issues logging on and staying logged on last night.

You think LK is scary? Maybe Halion with the scary cutters? Hell, apparently we should be more concerned of our guildies' kids as they seem to be more of a threat to our raiding!

Honestly though, I find this all kind of amusing. :)

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Blame game and putting guildies to work

We've had a lot of people in and out on vacations, so raiding has really slowed down for us. But last night I was able to put together enough to go take a crack at some ICC 10 hard modes with 6 guildies, 1 Thormaine, and 3 friends from a guild we've long done stuff with, Emerald.

It was interesting because this raid was a melee dps heavy group, while our raids are typically very caster dps heavy. Thus, Saurfang was quite different for us. It's also been a bit since we've had a good raid group to push any progression stuff, so I don't know about the others but I did feel kind of slow and rusty.

As I shared and exhibited last night, I really do think that successful raid leading is all about the proper assignment of blame. Healer somehow fails to see Mark of the Fallen on someone? Hunter's fault! Healer somehow gets hit by malleable goo at the worst possible time? Tanks' fault!

Do you have classes or people that you always blame? Hunters? DKs? In our typical runs, we don't have a hunter and while we have Qyburn tanking and Vyp dpsing as DKs, they typically don't get blamed. Hmmm, I think my blame game has less to do with certain classes and more to do with my personal relationship with the people.

Last night I alternated between blaming Bubble the hunter, Thormaine the ret pally, or the tanks. Venezia as a warrior tank had to get some blame, probably because I was transferring my typical practice of blaming Jess. I mean, I see a brown box in Grid, and its just natural and instinctive to send some blame that way.

Anyways, hopefully we can make this a decent raid week since next week is going to be tough as well with Clawcon-Chicago. This Clawcon feels a bit different to me than the last one. It probably feels this way for me since 3 folks are crashing at my place.

As I was telling Jess, it seems kind of personal and intimate that these guys are going to be seeing where and how I live. They'll get to know me in a different way. When they leave and we're online again, they'll be able to picture and envision me at my desk in my office, dropping f-bombs in arenas or bossing people around in raids.

Though with three guys crashing here, I've already put together a short "honey-do" list of things I need tall guys to do around the condo. Hahaha, I'm going to get my guildies to do a couple things for my place. Got to take advantage of it, no? Is that bad? :p

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Gaming and science

Things are really slow for us in game right now, with more raids being canceled than not. Unfortunately I don't think things are going to get back into a more reliable raiding schedule until later this month.

Anyways, an interesting gaming/science news related story I wanted to share. Kinda super geeky, but I find this interesting as my undergrad degree was a major in Biology, minor in Chemistry. I've done scientific research in the past, and have two parents who work in science.

An article came out in Nature last week that discusses using gamers to solve problems in predicting protein structure (one of the most difficult problems in molecular biology) through a game called Foldit.

Foldit is similar to Tetris, where gamers use different tools to interactively twist, jiggle, and reshape proteins. Interestingly enough, they found that gamers beat computer algorithms at this because they brought spatial reasoning and decision making to the table, as well as radical moves, risks, and long-term vision. Apparently there were 57,000 Foldit players at the time of publication.

Foldit has a mix of the three main motivators in online gaming: competition (players score points and are ranked), camaraderie (teams can play, sharing strategies and dividing labor) and immersion (players can lose themselves in the game).

"The integration of human visual problem-solving and strategy development capabilities with traditional computational algorithms through interactive multiplayer games is a powerful new approach to solving computationally-limited scientific problems".

The primary investigator noted that "he hoped that "the whole genre of scientific discovery games will really take off." and that:

"We're opening eyes in terms of how people think about human intelligence and group intelligence, and what the possibilities are when you get huge numbers of people together to solve a very hard problem."

I especially love this quote from the article:

"Our results indicate that scientific advancement is possible if even a small fraction of the energy that goes into playing computer games can be channelled into scientific discovery."

Wow, gamers and scientific discovery, eh?

----------------
* Press release here.
* NY Times article here
* Economist article here

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WG asshats

I used to post now and then about asshats I've encountered in game. The WoW universe must have known its been a while since I've done such a post, so it presented me with some asshats last night.

So Kimchee is 80 now, right? Thus, she tries to get into Wintergrasp every time its up so that she can collect the WG marks for PvP gear. Well last night she got into a WG run where a little over a minute before we were going to win, I got booted from the raid group. By the time I ported back to Dal, ran back to the WG guy, and rejoined a WG group, the victory had already been recorded. This means I did not get the 3 WG marks I fought for.

Apparently I was not the only one. A bunch of people were kicked from the raid I was in. People were hot! Hot, I tell ya! As was I. Turns out the offenders were from a ridiculous all caps guild (always a good predictor of a fail guild). After they booted a bunch of folks, the 3 of them obviously purposefully stood on top of the quest givers on mammoth mounts, for at least 10 minutes. I know this flavor of asshattery isn't new at all, but it was just icing on the cake after kicking people from the raid.

I wonder if Blizz can do anything so that WG groups don't get assigned a raid leader who has the power to kick people from the raid. Asshats and guilds who obviously get off on screwing with people are using this tactic to compensate for their ridiculously small, shriveled, and underutilized private parts.

So Gankafish, Moron, and Therealchazz from FASHION POLICE (no, I don't feel bad at all posting their toon and guild names): Fuck you.

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Kimchee hits 80!

Throughout this game, I have never been an alt person. I found there was enough to do between gearing K up with pvp gear or making money and going for gold cap. But I did start my little gnome lock Kimchee a while back. And while guildies were making fun of my slow leveling (I was busy leveling professions or doing pvp), she finally hit 80 last weekend. So yes, finally I have a second 80!

There's definitely a different feel playing her. She's little bundle of spicy cuteness and there is a sense of feeling more bouncy or cheery when playing her. I definitely relate to her shortness since I'm 5'2" IRL. And yes, there's probably some cute underhanded evilness I also relate to. :p I'm going to play her affliction and have an PVE and PVP affliction spec. As I've joked with the guildies, the pvp rotation she likes to use is dot-fear-giggle. It's a good rotation.

That I did my friend, that I did. I love seed of corruption. Love! Though doing a ton of bgs on Kimchee does make me appreciate K even more. It's hard to find healers in bgs.

Now I was saying on guild chat a while ago that somehow I feel like K and Kimchee would be best of friends. Like when I log off, they hang out together and go adventuring or something. I could see the tree stoically protecting her little spicy friend. Shat said that it might be like the Keebler elves, with Kimchee living inside of K.

Hahaha... precisely Shat, precisely.

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Blizz art exhibit and murloc hoodies!!!!

Two interesting bits of information recently posted on Kotaku. First, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Taipei will host an art exhibition by Blizzard running from August 20 to October 10. The exhibit, called "The Fights, Flights & Frights - Inside the Storm" will feature 800 paintings, sculptures, installations, and videos from StarCraft, Diablo and WarCraft.

There is so much incredible art produced by Blizz. I think it's neat that it'll be featured in a museum of contemporary art.

Secondly, murlocs. Ok so it may seem that I have a slight fascination of murlocs as exhibited by some past posts. But, check this out. Dinohoodie has created murloc hoodies!!! ZOMG!!!

Ok, ok. I admit it. My name is K and I like murlocs.

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Mmmm humble pie

Last week we took what we thought was going to be a quick saunter (yes, saunter) back to RS to see Halion. It had been a while since our last Halion kill, but we had done it before so I think everyone figured it'd be cake.

Now our raiding schedule has definitely slowed down a lot due to folks being out, and we took a week off for Clawcon west. But perhaps we were really out of practice because after a perfect first attempt where we wiped at 2% due to something crazy (I don't remember), we screwed up every subsequent attempt after that.

It was just crazy because we had clearly done this successfully before, yet there we were making random mistakes. I joked that we must have been cursed that night, cuz we were just so so off. The funniest part of it was that around 4 wipes or so I spoke up on vent, saying something to the effect of "Ok guys, let's focus and not screw around. We're wasting time". Then what happens? Very next attempt, I do something ridiculously stupid and die. /sigh Mmmm humble pie so so tasty.

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