On Mon, 2005-03-07 at 01:51 -0500, James Freeman wrote:
> So this leads me to this scenario and a question, your manager has asked
> you to be part of the interview process for a new programmer position
> that involves Perl and he wants you to make sure this person knows their
> Perl.
I use a technique that's very controversial at my company. Most people
think I'm quizzing people for useless trivia, and they're 1/2 right. I
fire a bunch of questions at you that look for the kinds of trivia that
you pick up while writing Perl.
Just as two examples, I like to use "what is $_" as my first question.
If you don't know that, then clearly you have only glanced off of Perl
at best. We can move on. The last question is, "What is 'A'|'B'" (I got
this from a Boston.pm member long ago). The correct answer depends on
your knowing a bit of Perl trivia: how bit-vector ops work. If you know
it, it's easy (65|66=67='C'). If you don't know it, that doesn't say
anything about you as a Perl programmer, only provides one data-point. I
look for someone who knows lots of little bits of trivia, indicating
that they have spent lots of time with Perl. If you know more trivia
than I do (I've yet to see that), then I would hire you on the spot.
Side note: We recently hired someone who didn't know Perl very well, but
on the above 'A'|'B' he worked out the correct answer purely by deducing
how a language might treat that construct. THAT was far more impressive
to me than KNOWING the answer.
Let me also note that if someone KNOWS Perl, that doesn't mean they know
how to WORK in Perl. Get code samples of real, working code!
Other concerns:
* Come up with questions that have simple answers, and can thus be
asked by others who don't know Perl as well as you do.
* Don't ask style questions (e.g. "should you use $_ ?") You will
find that people who disagree with you are often still very
helpful
* DO ask at least one inflammatory question (e.g. "would you
prefer to work in Python?") You don't care about the answer...
you care about the TONE of the answer. Make sure you're not
hiring a hot-head Perl fanatic (or any other flavor of fanatic
for that matter).
* Ask at least one probing question to determine how much they
enjoy coding. Something like, "what's your favorite personal
project," works well.
Good luck, but keep in mind I'm not giving away all my best tricks! ;-)
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