I can only offer my experience, which I hope will help some.
The best employees I've ever had for difficult or changing situations
were those with general problem-solving skills. In my two best cases,
neither knew anything about the programming language we were using or
the database when they were hired,but they quickly became invaluable and
productive. In both cases their resumes spoke of their basic
intelligence and when I met them I like them, so I hired them (or begged
the powers to be to hire them).
As for questions, its good to have a formal test you ask them to take,
but interviewing is an art you can only get good at with practice. The
usual advice applies, be yourself, ask questions about things that are
important to you, and see how the person responds. Also check with HR
to find out what you are *not* allowed to ask, anything that could be
construed to be a basis for discrimination like age.
If you like somebody and think they will work out, ask them to come back
and invite in 2 or 3 of their potential coworkers and have a short
brainstorming session on a problem you have at the moment. See what
they contribute.
Ben Sgro (ProjectSkyline) wrote:
Good Morning,
In a few days, I will be sitting down with a perspective employee,
and I'd like to get some feedback on good programming questions
or excercises I can have them work on.
At my last job, prior to becomming a fulltime consultant, I was asked
to create a login function, that checked the username and password
against a file.
I did well, and felt that was a decent test. It had IO, security, string
comparisions, fetching values from $_POST/$_GET ...
This test was in addition to source code I provided for libraries I had
written, and of course my resume.
Now, the position being filled is that of an entry level programmer.
I do not expect this person to be well trained in PHP/MySQL,
but they must have a pretty strong understanding of programming
methodologies in general (they are a college grad - CIS).
So, again, what are some good metrics I can use to test these
perspective employees?
Thank you!
- Ben
Ben Sgro, Chief Engineer
ProjectSkyLine - Defining New Horizons
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--
Kenneth Downs
Secure Data Software, Inc.
www.secdat.com www.andromeda-project.org
631-689-7200 Fax: 631-689-0527
cell: 631-379-0010
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