thoughts.on.code

Found this brilliant post on programmer screenings tonight on Steve Yegge’s old blog. Even though they are a few years old, these questions pack a serious technical challenge for anyone who doesn’t know their stuff in a broad range of programming kung-fu. Steve covers all of the basics (OO, scripting, data structures, real code, and cs fundamentals, recursion). The questions are designed to balance out each other, so you don’t get a YASD, and you don’t get a Perl hacker (unless they are really good).

Oooohhh boy do I feel sorry for the next person I interview! I touch on a number of these currently, but since there is usually a specific technology (ie Struts (shudder), J2EE (double shudder), or Hibernate (shrug)) involved, it becomes easy to look past some of the more fundamental questions, looking for a bit more depth in that one technology. Unfortunately, that is not a good idea. It is really easy for some people to memorize the talking points for a set of technologies, and maybe even have basic understanding of them. It is something else entirely for them to be able to tell you the underlying principles and concepts. And it is almost impossible to find someone who could tell you how they would implement it, and get a reasonable answer.

Man, now I’m itchin’ to do a screenin’! (and inexplicably writing with a drawl)