Re: not enough real programmers?

[jon@axtell.obvious.demon.co.uk (Jon Axtell)]

In article <37b41121@195.34.192.13>, on Wed, 11 Aug 1999 22:58:51
+0100, "Ruff Records" <ruffrecords@geocities.com> wrote:
 
>
>Luc Van der Veken wrote in message
>>But with the exception of maybe one question (the C++ one), the
>>answers you'll get won't give an indication of whether the people
>>you're interviewing are [technically] competent for doing the
>>job.
>>
>This is definitely not true.  It is an excellent technique that I have used
>to recruit many very technically competent people.

When I was interviewing people (and I have interviewed over 100
engineers) I made up a simple questionaire which was deliberately
open-ended. It was a more look at this sample of code, and discuss.
It's aim was to get the engineer to talk about the code sample and
from their views I got a very good impression of what kind of
programmer they were, and also if they /really/ knew C.

The questions were like...
1) if (toupper( *ch++)) == 'A') then ch++
2) if (x)
      if (y == y1)
      {
         z = x;
      }
   else
   {
   }

1) side-effect from ch++ in a macro which is evaluated twice
2) indentation wrong, else ties up with nested if

Surprisingly a significant number of people didn't spot the second one
without some prompting, and one had to be told the answer!

>>What you will get is a collection of the best salespeople (those
>>who are best in verbal expression an
>d presentation), instead of
>>the best programmers.
>>
>>As replies to your first two questions you'll probably get a
>>description (told in the first person) of the important decisions
>>the project leader made, and how the *team* the applicant was in
>>attacked the project.
>>
>
>But that is just when a good interviewer knows to probe the candidate for
>THEIR contribution.

And when a candidate says that the team produced a good product at the
end of the project, then you know you're hiring a team player. If the
person says *I* did this and *I* did that with no reference to the
team (unless it was really a one man project) then I wouldn't hire him
as he wouldn't fit in with the rest of the team.

[snip]

Jon

-- 
jon@axtell.obvious.demon.co.uk
Remove the obvious bit