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How Should You Interview a Programmer?
phamlen asks: "Having hired several programmers who haven't worked out, I'm wondering if other people have better success with interviewing techniques. Usually we have a two 'technical interviews' and a final interview. The technical interviews tend to be a combination of specific technical questions ('Is friendship inherited? How would you find out?') and algorithmic ('Given the numbers from 1-10 missing one number, how do you find the missing number?'). In addition, we essentially try to interview for: intelligence/performance. technical skills (algorithmic, etc.), and team compatibility. Unfortunately, we've been burned a couple of times by people whose performance didn't measure up to what we expected from the interviews. So I'm wondering if other people wanted to share their interviewing tricks - how do you find out if someone is a good programmer?" Surprisingly enough, we've done a series of these, so if you are interested in similar questions for sysadmins,
network engineers, or the one who will follow in your footsteps, then we've got it covered. We've also covered core IT questions as well. What special ways do you have of evaluating potential coders? How well have they worked out?
Wow. If I was interviewing you, I wouldn't be able to express how happy I was that you revealed yourself to be a complete clod during the interview, rather than bothering to 'appear professional' in front of your prospective employer.
>in fact, the kind of programmers that are likely to contribute to OSS projects are probably those that CAN'T find a job
And you got an Insightful for this crack-head thought? Can I apply this to sports please? Obviously, the best athletes never engage in anything remotely outside of their chosen sport and league, right? And the best engineers never use their engineering skills outside of work. And doctors never offer their knowledge pro bono to friends and family outside of work.
God damnit, if I met a programmer who didn't do any programming outside of work, I'd assume he *didn't* like coding, he just liked the salary.
Also, please provide any collolation between job satisfaction (which depends, usually, on *what* you are building, in what environment, with who) and programming skills (your ability to implement a solution based on specs). Can't think of too many programmers who hated their jobs because they were bad programmers. Ironically, bad programmers tend to be much less aware of their inabilities and thus don't read so much into meeting their own personal goals as it relates to job satisfaction. The programmers we fired tended to be much more blissfully ignorant and happy with their position despite their lack of skills than us mainstays, who are much more emotionally tied to the success of our solutions and engineering and thus are less satisfied with our jobs when our environment conspires against us.
And so we are left with: KDE/Kernel/GNOME/etc/etc/etc developers obviously can't get a job in programming, so they just develop OSS projects, right? (Of course, you also conveniently forget to point out that there are tons of developers for whom developing OSS _is_ their job.)
"Old man yells at systemd"