Re: not enough real programmers? (was Re: Byte Magazine: 18 Vintage issues, 1985-1986)

[gillies@cs.ubc.ca (Donald Gillies)]

prs@gol.com (Peter Stephenson) writes:

>On Thu, 5 Aug 1999 19:12:46 -0400, "Ian St. John"
><istjohn@spamcop.net> wrote:

>>
>>Downsizing, and outsourcing are other factors, creating a demand for
>>documentation as proof of specific skill. More effort is spent on
>>'personnel searches', and less 'personal evaluation' is made. When the
>>person turns out to have the experience, but not the skill, it just
>>forces higher 'minimal qualifications'.
>>
>All true.  It can be difficult recruiting good programmers, though.  I
>mean, how the hell do you find out whether they can code in an
>interview?

In 1995 I took an "internet test" (after a phone interviewer, the
interviewer two states away set up an on-line test).  He prepared a
computer with an open account and gave me 3 hours to solve 3 problems.
Here were some of the problems :

(a) Rebuild the perl interpreter.  This is not hard, except that the
makefile lacked a command to rebuild the yacc grammer , and I had to
know enough about UNIX to figure this out and invoke yacc.  I had
never used yacc, but I figure out how to run it with the man pages.

(b) Modify /etc/login to allow passwords of arbitrary length (not just
8 characters).

(c) Cannot remember the third one.

Anyway, I think this was an excellent way to assess peoples' skills.
This was for a fairly senior position (staff engineer).

- Don