kicking puppies is bad

I had a pseudo-phone-interview yesterday. It wasn’t really an interview, it was more of an initial phone screening. The person performing the screening worked in HR and had almost no programming / technical knowledge relevant to the position. He also was fairly unfamiliar with the scope of the position and with the development group that the position was part of.

At one point in the interview, he clearly had a list of concepts that he was told to ask me if I was familiar with. Most of them were modules (Base SAS, SAS STAT, SAS Graph), but some of them were procedures (PROC SQL, PROC REG) or other SAS concepts (macros, ODS, DDE).

Interviewer: What SAS Modules are you familiar with?
Me: I work mostly with BASE SAS and SAS GRAPH. My current position doesn’t utilize SAS STAT often, but my previous position did.
Interviewer: What about the PROC module and SQL?

For those of you who don’t program in SAS (which I assume is most everyone. Why would anyone want to be a SAS programmer?), I will attempt to translate this:

Interviewer: What letters of the alphabet are you familiar with?
Me: Well the letters I most commonly use are ‘E’ and ‘T’, but I am fairly familiar with the entire alphabet.
Interviewer: What about the letter “puppy” and “apples”?

Even that doesn’t express how odd the question was because “puppy” is a fully formed concept. I could address my knowledge of puppies by saying something like, “I’m not familiar with ‘puppy’ in the context of the alphabet, but I interact with puppies fairly frequently”. “PROC” isn’t something you can be familiar with. You can be familiar with PROC SQL, PROC REG, PROC MEANS, PROC GPLOT, etc. But “PROC” by itself is meaningless.

Since the interviewer asked about “PROC” and “SQL” in the same sentence, I addressed my “SQL” knowledge. He moved on and didn’t mention my knowledge of “PROC” again. I’m fairly certain that this was not a trick question. It just reflected his lack of knowledge on the topic.

Should I have corrected him? I’m slightly worried that this might have actually been a screening tool, not just ignorance on the part of the interviewer. Now they will either think that I am the programming equivalent of a retarded monkey on acid (which could be true), or that I am a spineless sea slug who will go along with ludicrous stupidity to avoid confrontation (which also might be true).

I hate interviews.