On 08/10/13 05:28, Doug Chanco wrote:
> Questions I have been asked (and my favorites)
> 
> Tell me a solution to get the last day of a given month (pick)

I used that as a test question - it was quite revealing ...

Another question we used - look for some bad code in one of your own
programs. Ask the candidates to work out what it does, and ask "could
you do better?".

The code we found was ten lines that (badly) re-implemented the round()
function. ALL the candidates except one tried to rewrite it and made a
total hash of it. One person actually spotted what it was trying to do
and said "you could use the round function". Even more impressive, he
commented that he hadn't bothered to work out what it did when fed
negative numbers but he mentioned the appropriate options.

I think all told we had about four questions and gave candidates an
hour. We were quite explicit that that was NOT enough time to do a good
job, and we wanted quick and dirty answers, but the number of people who
clearly wasted most of their time on question 1 was amazing.

If you're going to call people back for a second interview, that's a
good approach - give them a few open-ended questions and see how they
tackle them. The no-hopers can be dropped and the few who can even read
the questions properly can be called back for a further grilling :-)

Cheers,
Wol
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