On Mon, 07 Mar 2005 01:51:03 -0500, James Freeman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 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. You only have a short time to interview each candidate, and to be > fair to each applicant you set up five questions to ask each one. What > five questions do you ask? To help set aside some obvious responses > that I don't think will help assume that the person does has whatever > minimum paper qualification or certification if one exists, but it is > your ass if the person hired isn't good at Perl. Also, due to the > nature of the position this person and position would not be a threat to > your job in any way as well.
I think that everyone who interviews regularly has favorite questions to ask. Personally I have a simple algorithm question, I put up a few lines of Perl (a simple double loop), ask what it does, say that it worked fine in testing, but when you put it into production there were performance problems traced back to it, then ask for ideas on how to improve performance. I ask all parts slowly and give lots of time to think (I know that people don't think well under pressure, and my goal is certainly not to "trip you up"). There are many "right answers", but if you give an optimization that may change the result of the code slightly I'll follow up and ask what you need to investigate before knowing that you can go with that solution. I've found over time that anyone I consider to be reasonably competent finds this question very easy, but most programmers that I give it to fail abysmally. I've also had luck using this question to judge people who don't know Perl yet. Other good technical interview questions include creating a couple of sample tables and asking for the SQL for a series of basic reports against it. It is amazing how many people claim to know SQL but regard a join as an advanced topic that they'll get to someday... Cheers, Ben _______________________________________________ Boston-pm mailing list [email protected] http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
