I'm involved in a series of interviews for another Anti-Virus technician in the group. There's five candidates, of which one is working in the OEM lab, two were ex-testers in another divisions, one that used to work in this role as a vendor, and finally an external candidate that is the husband to a project manager on the IT side.

Not wanting to cloud my judgements, but i think it would be a very funny situation in their household if he does get hired, considering the bad blood between the IT side and our side right now.

Having a trained tester, with possibly relevant or even better technical skills than i have, will help to develop our team further. The vendor that used to do this job obviously has a major advantage, in that he had already done the job previously, and he has very specific knowledge in terms of compression algorithms and great patience in analyzing files for patterns.

My manager told me that i'll have a large say in the selection, since that person has to work with me very closely on a daily basis, and that i need to be comfortable with that person enough to be able to be out of the office and out of emails for many weeks (e.g. when i'm back in Singapore). Already i'm thinking of problem solving questions and technical questions to ask these candidates.

Let's see how it goes.