If you’re ever been on an interview, you’ve most likely heard any of these useless questions:

1. Where do you see yourself in 5 years?
2. What are your greatest strengths?
3. What are your biggest weaknesses?
4. Why do you want this job?
5. Why should we hire you?
6. What type of animal/tree/food/mineral/planet are you?

Now I’ve seen many interviewers that say these are very important because they say something about the candidate! Yes, they say just how much time you’ve wasted online looking for answers to these very questions. Overall, they say nothing, and really have nothing to do with any job.

After all…

#1 Where do you see yourself in 5 years — what are you psychic? Now the interviewers say they want to know what goals you have for yourself to see if their inline with the company… but in all honesty, chances are in 5 years you’ll be looking for another job because either they’ve let you go, the company’s shut down, or just the job totally sucks and you’re needing something better, or they aren’t paying you enough. At the same time, there’s not really that many companies that have advancement no matter what job you’ve got. You a programmer? Great! Start at an entry-level position, work your way up to senior programmer (maybe 10 years if that), but after that you’ve got to either leave the company or enter a position unrelated to programming. If they’re looking for a programmer, and you say in 5 years you’ll be doing something other than programming (because, well, you might just be if you advance like planned) – do you really think they’ll hire you for a programming position?

As a similar thing, how do you even know that during the interview some plane, semi, train, car, etc isn’t going to come crashing through the building and take you out – or just cause the business to close shop? How do you know you won’t die unexpectedly while sitting there? You have no clue what will actually happen 5 seconds from now, let alone 5 years. A similar thing exists for what you’d be expecting: you can’t give specifics, only some vague standard “doing a job related to {the job I’m interviewing for now} with a company I love” which is pretty much the happy little lie that the interviewer likes to hear even though they know you’re lying. You’d really like to see yourself owning your own island with tons of parties, money, and not having to work.

#1.5 What guarantee can you make that you’ll still be here in 5 years? — This is a question sometimes asked, but is really similar to #1, so we call it 1.5. A person can’t guarantee that they’ll be alive in 24 hours — there’s no way they can guarantee you’ll still be working for them in 5 years. The business can’t even guarantee that they’ll be around in 5 years. They can’t even guarantee that they’d still be keeping you around that long. This question is the dumbest one around as you can’t even give a standard response – as it requires knowledge of the future, and a guarantee that knowledge of future events won’t cause the future events to be changed (so everything’s set in stone, if you know you’re going to be killed in a car accident at 8am, even if you have yourself committed into a padded room, the act of you getting committed will cause you to die in the accident). Yet there are some really dumb people demanding a guarantee from people before they’ll hire them.

#2 & #3 What are your greatest strengths/What are your biggest weaknesses? — Yeah, and who’s going to say their biggest strength is the ability to drink anyone under the table, and the biggest weakness is missing too much work from being in jail for drug offenses? Once again, the interviewer expects you to lie and give a canned response. But if you think about it, do they really want your strength/weakness in reality, or as related to the job you’re applying? If it’s in life, it doesn’t apply and shouldn’t be asked for it has nothing to do with the job at hand; if it’s the job, what if you’re just now entering the field? Do they want you to answer given your jobs overall? What if you got injured at your prior job in a way that you couldn’t/shouldn’t do it anymore, and are going into a different field? The greatest strength of a human resource manager wouldn’t really matter if you’re going to work in a non-HR capacity. If your job was as a programmer, your greatest strength/weakness wouldn’t apply to a non-programming job — overall of course, as some things (ability to solve problems, etc) could overlap in a general sense.

#4 & #5 Why do you want this job / Why should we hire you? — For virtually everyone in the world, the “why” would be “I need a job/I need more money” or a variant thereof, and the answer of why they should hire you, if answered honestly, would be the same answer. There’s not much else to say about this, every so often a person wants a job because they actually just want the job (and don’t need a new one, they’re moving on because of desire), every so often a person has a unique set of skills that matches a job position perfectly. In the end, why the company should hire you over someone else is entirely up to the company. A person either has the requirements for a job, or they don’t. They’ve got no idea what skill set anyone else applying for the job has. It’s just one of those questions that is pretty much useless. The person needs a job – that’s it. If they applied, they aren’t overqualified for the job. They aren’t going to leave you in a few weeks for another job (generally). They applied and showed up because they need a job.

#6 What type of animal/tree/food/mineral/planet are you? — Or any other question along these lines where they try to figure out what makes you tick by saying you’re a “yellow fox orbiting Jupiter”. The interviewer might have some psychology-based research paper that says “someone who identifies as a ____ is ____” and might be going by that to find the “perfect match”. Yet the person applying for the job might say they’re a cat because they like cats, not because they’re a predator that stalks and kills their prey.

In the end it all comes down to a few things about job openings, a business will always end up getting more applications than they have open positions. Some people will have to be cut. But questions like these and others that are just dumb to even ask could all be eliminated with one very simple way: have the employee wait 5-10 minutes in the waiting room, and ask the receptionist their opinion of them, and what they did (or use security footage). That’s it. If they practically bite the head off the receptionist, you’ve got a better idea of what type of person they are than what type of animal they are. If they’re polite, look around, check out any awards, pictures, etc you’ve got up about your business – you know they’re interested in your company. If they sit like a dead log and don’t even check out the rules of the business that might be on the wall, you can figure out other things.

So how many campaign promises will Obama discard, forget, or just outright say “I had no intention of doing it” (or in politician speak: “it’s important to realize that some things take time for adjustment and support to gain momentum”)? Some of them? All of them? Or better yet, given the different people, his own comments, the media/etc, do we even know what he stood for at the start? Or perhaps the best question of it all: is it even slightly surprising that he isn’t even put in office, yet he’s already going against things he said he was going to do (according to some of his supporters as well)?

To be honest, no one should even be slightly surprised. He’s a politician – and a good one. But that isn’t to say he’s a good ethical person, just that he knows how to manipulate the masses to get what he wants. As is the way of the political machine; politicians are the best manipulators of the crowd, at least in larger state-federal elections.

The big question on my mind isn’t why he’s not doing what he’d say he’d do (or so the reports say), but why is it that people are shocked or even reporting on it? Everyone knew, or should, that his campaign was the same as all the others: say whatever gets you elected, and be quick on your feet when you’re caught being on both sides.

There are people out there that have never voted. They’ve never even registered to vote. So it makes me wonder, if they don’t vote and register, by not voting does anyone care?

If you’re registered and you don’t vote, you show up as not voting. People know “hey, this person didn’t vote!” But if you’re not even registered, do we really know how many aren’t? Not registered and not voting might only mean they don’t care, or they don’t like the candidates. But if you’re registered and don’t vote, it most likely means you don’t like the candidates.

It almost seems that if people were automatically registered to vote once they hit the age of being allowed to (or done so when they become a citizen or whatever else is required) — we’d have a more accurate representation of what people really think. Wouldn’t be that hard to get people registered either — go by ID cards or something. Make it so that whenever someone get’s a driver’s license, or just an ID card, they also have to register to vote.

Over the past few months, and most likely until the end of time now (or as long as he’s mentioned in the history books), people will be dabating on many things about Obama… may most likely will be completely untrue, others will be plausible enough that they won’t be able to be proven “true” in the minds of some, nor “false” in the minds of other — no matter what’s decided.

The biggest thing right now is the “Was Obama an Indonesian citizen?”, “was he really Muslim”, or even “was he even born in the USA?” The world may never get an answer to these that satisfies all.

And perhaps the biggest question of them all, assuming he is elected president by the actual people that vote on it, “will his ability to be president ever stop being questioned even after his 4 years are up?”

Then why do we even bother?  I’m not saying we shouldn’t, but during the last election the phrase “no republican has ever won without winning Ohio” came up quite a lot — some news agencies even gave the presidency to Obama the second they knew who won Ohio.

So it does raise the question, if the other states are so well known for who they’ll go, is that a problem?  Are the states really voting for the beliefs of the candidate, or just the party?  And if one state decides it all (so to speak) why do they even bother?

It’s just one of those things that’s highly upsetting if you think about it.  Millions of people get tossed aside because they don’t count in the overall thing, and all the campainging gets done in a few states – but then it’s all down to one state in the end anyway.

Will anyone even notice if President George Bush does anything?  Like what if he starts a new war?  What if he invades a country or something?  Will the media and people ever find out, or will this “Obama’s elected, so everything’s different, let’s see what he’s up to now!” attidute make the people generally blinded to anything going on?

Here’s something funny I’ve discovered here lately when getting paperwork for potentially running for a local office:  a form to report any conflicts of interest.

Now it doesn’t matter what you put on it, you’ll still able to run.  They just want you to list any conflicts so it’s public knowledge (despite most of the public probably not even knowing the form or information exists).  So really it’s just a joke.  Doesn’t matter what you do, what companies you represent, you can still run for office (well, there might be some things prevented, but overall).

Now while I personally wouldn’t mind a teacher running for office (despite it being a potential conflict as they’d be more pro-edication than say, a doctor [who'd have a conflict as they could alter medical laws]), and see how it can be useful…. but at the same time it just seems kind of pointless in the end.  Especially since some of the “conflicts” are the reasons why the people would be voting for them in the first place.

Now that it’s assumed that he’ll be president, I keep on looking at the actual votes cast — it’s close in a sense… under 2 million votes separate the two at the time of this post…. for me, personally, I prefer a much greater span of votes. The greater the span, the less divided the country truly is over who’s in office.

Perhaps it will grow, maybe not. But no matter what — a lot of people will most likely not be happy.

edit: 2.5 million votes separate them now… a bit better, but I’d really prefer 15 million.

Well at the time this is posted, it’s highly likely given general statistics and predictions.  Now while it’s possible that everything will be tossed on its head, chances are Obama will be the new President.

Which leads to the questoin:  did you really think he’d be the best president for the country?

You remember it right?  When Republicans won the electoral college vote, you kept on hearing “but the popular vote is so close!  We were ripped off!”  Yet…. now that the electoral college vote is in the favor of Obama…. “Electoral College is great!  Look!  Everyone loves him!”

Yet at the time of this post?  Popular vote has under 1 million vote difference between them.

Amazing isn’t it?