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Measuring LAMP Competency?
An anonymous reader writes "Our company is getting ready to hire a number of programmers. While the majority of the prospective candidates do have good-looking resumes, we are looking to see if we can get some clear metrics in the assessment process. After a little research we have learned that there is a well-established PHP + MySQL training and certification process, and some of the candidates are already certified. There is also a candidate with a good portfolio, a lot of experience, and no certification. Most of the applicants also have some college/university science-related education. So our goal is to be able to somehow measure LAMP overall competency as well as basic computer science concepts such as BNF, data normalization, OOP, MVC, etc. How do Slashdot readers go about this kind of characterization?"
Get them to write a trivial app.
If it contains 'INSERT INTO table ('. $foo. ');'
Kill them.
If they can't talk intelligently about what they say they've done... next!
Free as in "the Truth shall set you..."
Personally I have no faith in certifications at all. I know tons of people who are certified out the yazoo and can't do a darn thing. I also knows tons of people with no certifications especially in open source where lots of us were working long before there were certifications, that figure things out on their own and dig for information. The people that are driven to dig are the ones that rock the house. Needing a course to learn is some what of an automatic fail to me. You will learn far more about which type of person they are in the interview than you will from a certification.
The answer seems simple. Ask for guest access to a server that they configured. If they don't have something like that you could set up a simple lamp server and have them perform some basic tasks.
This may be good for interviewing people for a sysadmin position, but I fail to see how configuring a server has anything to do with the applicants ability to develop software.
Why BNF?
Since you're looking to recruit a number of people, I'd say that their ability to work together - personalities, maturity, compatibility are at least as important as skills and experience. So don't just pick the top X according to how they rank at interview, consider if you think they can work together as a team.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
there is no higher proof of competency and ability than proof of prior work. certificates are like school courses. everybody can take one if one attends the courses, or passes an exam. practicing in the field however, is an entirely different matter.
portfolio shows that you not only know your field, but also you have properly and responsibly participated in projects, collaborated, and actually built stuff with it, and saw them to their completion.
that is the kind of people you want to hire. and nothing than a portfolio shows it better.
Read radical news here
You need to actually be testing their ability to write software. As a few others have pointed out, having them develop a simple web application as part of the interview process is probably going to be the best way to measure that ability.
Additionally, to test their integration skills, you could also have them attempt to develop a new page to be integrated into your company's product. Not only will this show off their software development skills, but will also give you some insight into their ability to inherit an existing software project and work with it (something that he vast majority of newly-hired developers will have to do).
I was you, i would NEVER hire anyone with a certificate, NEVER. Obtaining a certificate is simply lost money, and lost time. Not mentioning the fact that every monkey with well designed short memory could remember a 2000 pages MS Server certificate Q&A, and become what? Monkey with MS Server certificate? And i am not joking, i really know such a people, who does not ever have a math degree, but who have a lot of "certificates".... Anyway, good look, you will need one.
First you define what you want:
Do you want technical certs? Then look for people with those.
Do you want people with academic background (data normalization, OOP, etc)? Then look for people with CS degree.
Do you want people with experience? Then look for people with relevant experience, and or do a practical test as suggested (which everyone can get their smart friend to do for them I'm sure)
Weight each one of the factors according to what he or she is supposed to be doing.
Systems analyst? Architecture design? Jr. code monkey? Overall hacker (jack of all trades, master of none)?
Then rank them in each factor. Most of those factores are qualitative more than quantitative by the way.
But sometimes, the best programmers are not the ones with the best qualifications, but the ones with the best fit into your business. 8 years php experience vs 4 years php experience IN YOUR INDUSTRY: I'll pick the 4 year experience guy.
please excuse my apathy
As someone who has run a dedicated server for seven years, I would never grant any unknown third party access to my server. Even as a guest with almost no permissions. That's just inviting trouble into your house. Give them code samples, answer questions, provide references, but keep the digital doors locked unless you don't value the data on the machine.
If they have the right buzzwords on their resume, bring them in and ask them technical questions relevant to your environment. Then, throw in a few questions related to other technologies on their resume that aren't directly relevant to your environment just to see if they're the type of person who likes to puff up their resume by listing stuff they don't really know. You have to have at least a passing knowledge of the stuff you ask about, of course.
After you've established a baseline technical competency, ask them to solve a few simple programming problems to measure their problem solving ability. Doing them in PHP or Perl is obviously a bonus since you're dealing with LAMP, but pseudocode should be fine in a live interview type of situation. Don't judge things like missed semicolons too harshly, they're probably nervous. Concoct some basic scenarios dealing with the L or A part of the LAMP stack to judge their troubleshooting ability. Ask them for some SQL statements to pull certain data from a hypothetical database for the M part.
Interspersed throughout should be questions that judge how well they'll fit into your company culture and how easily they can learn new things or deal with new and unexpected situations. For these, concentrate on asking about past experiences of that type rather than asking canned hypotheticals that everyone has already seen on the Internet and knows how to answer.
A person's technical competence is not a reliable predictor of success. It's part of the equation, but his or her ability to learn and grow with the company, as well as the ability to fit in with your company culture, is much more important unless you're just looking for temporary contract labor.
Also, don't be afraid to ask your friendly neighborhood PHB. If he's taken any sort of business classes at all, and didn't spend the entire time Facebooking instead of paying attention, he should have plenty of insight on effective hiring.
That's what probation periods are for.
If you try to quantify it, you'll end up hiring people who are good at gaming your system. That's a skillset, I suppose, but probably not the one you're looking for.
Skip the alphabet soup. Do you really have no one on staff capable of recognizing competence?
If you don't, who were you planning to have manage the new hires? Who were you planning to have interpret your metrics?
As always, all IMO. Insert "I think" everywhere grammatically possible.
While hiring people on a temporary basis sounds like a good idea, it has some serious flaws. Hiring 3 temporary employees with the plan to axe 2 makes for a very stressful/hostile work environment. Only those potential employees with no other job opportunities/offers would even consider it (which is most likely the worst applicants). The list of bad aspects of this idea is longer.
A good work ethic and honesty ...
is not hiring two persons to drop them few months later.
Not to mention it's going to be tough finding someone willing to give up two months of their lives just for a working interview with no guarantee of further employment. Better be ready to pay consultant-level fees to those guys for those two months.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
If you have to ask how to interview software engineers for competency, maybe you are not qualified to be interviewing software engineers.
Good experience is far more important than any certification. Wanna see if they can design and build software? Give them a problem that requires they outline a design and then have them code up specific pieces like DB table schema, table queries, classes, templates etc.
If they are told up front their position is temporary, what's the problem?
I've hired a couple programmers in the past and there is always one question I ask that I have found sorts out some of the better candidates. The question - "I've just requested you to do some task and you find you really haven't worked out that type of task in the past and aren't fully sure the best approach. What do you do?" The answer I'm looking for is basically they'll let me know that's a new area for them, but that they'll go out and find examples of that type of task and research it and find out how to make it happen. If they say anything along the lines of having me help them, or ask to go to a class, or anything along that line it will automatically set up red flags. And of course, just answering the question "correctly" doesn't automatically mean they are good at doing that, but you can dig deeper into how they'd research it, etc. I've been a programmer for over 25 years now and while there are certain core things that a computer can do and some it can't, the actual processing of it is what matters and it's nearly impossible for you to remember every little detail of every language and system, the real power is in knowing where to look to quickly get your answer. And as a final important talent, a person needs to be good at understanding and conversing specifications from someone that is not technical. Just my thoughts on what I've looked for....
as well as basic computer science concepts such as BNF, data normalization, OOP, MVC, etc.
Put 10 seasoned programmers in a room and, without access to references or preparation, ask them to write the BNF for some subset of a well-known language, normalise a database in stages up to 5th normal form, give a detailed description of OOP implementation in any language (not just "how is inheritance formed?" but "demonstrate polymorphic behaviour - suggest how it might have been implemented - describe its disadvantages" etc.) and ask them to fit some app description into MVC pattern.
You know what? Zero of them will succeed in all of your tasks. And, dear reader, if you claim that you will then you are lying.
You know why? Because testing like this doesn't reveal anything. I passed University with top grades throughout because I knew how to bone up for an exam and cough up the syllabus as requested, as well as having a moderately mathematical head. I can demonstrate prior performance and I can grasp new concepts. I can remind myself quickly of old concepts when given access to a reference.
But I don't have some magical savant-level ability to memorise everything I've ever done (and, experiments on savants suggest, if I did then I'd lack the skills to apply my elephantine knowledge to solving general commercial development problems). It's never hindered me. This sort of ability might be necessary if I were, say, a field intelligence agent(?), and not being able to concoct the right deception within a subsecond time interval might result in my death. Otherwise, it's just a dog and pony show.
In the past, I've asked people to send me sample code. Some was protected by various agreements, so they sent me snippets that were enough for me to review their coding style, without giving away the details of their work.
The clincher is always the interview. I don't just sit down and talk with someone about what they know, and let them brag without anything supporting it. Ask real world questions. Have them write a few lines of code to do something on a piece of paper or whiteboard. It doesn't have to be syntactically perfect, but it has to be close.
My interviews were more for sysadmin stuff, so having them describe what they'd do for a task can be very revealing. Like a question like this:
"The COO has come to you, because no one else is available. The CEO is flipping out. There's a server on the network running some common variety of Linux. Transfer rates from it to any other machine are very slow, regardless of the protocol. i.e., http, ftp, rsync, samba are all slow. What do you do?"
I'll have established what the real fault is in my head, and give them appropriate answers to what they say to do.
It's a pretty simple one to solve, or at least bring to a point where authorized assistance is needed. I've gotten all kinds of answers to that one. Some answer "call someone else for assistance", which I tell them the someone else is unavailable. Some just reboot it, which isn't a valid answer as a first step. I tell them "No, it's a production machine. You can't." Some actually start pinging, checking ifconfig for errors on the interface, and check the interface duplex. Obviously, the last set of answers is the right one.
Adding extra stress is always useful, if they don't get it right off. A little yelling and table pounding is enough for that. "The COO is demanding an answer now! [pounding on table] We're losing money! If you don't get this fixed, it's your job on the line!" Some people do fine. Some just stare at you dumbfounded without a clue if they don't have Google in front of them.
When it's my interview, and my decision (it's not always both), I evaluate how good the answers were, even if they were wrong. Did the guy show a competent level of knowledge, or does he just think he can do the job and has no clue. A few will float to the top, and quite a few get put to the bottom of the list.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
A lack of ability to properly configure a server can often lead to developers writing code that requires more than the minimum privilege level, wonky configuration "needs" without really thinking it through, and a mindset of "throw hardware at it!" Working previously as a system admin at a web hosting company, the new hires that came to us, usually with a lack of college education or experience with compiled languages but a lot of experience as "web developers", they answers usually involved excessive needs for additional memory. A lot of the resource abuse issues I had to deal with also boiled down to a customer installing a software package that had a lot of neat features but required dedicated hardware to run far in excess of what a shared hosting package or even a VPS could deliver without affecting quality of service for other customers.
I'll freely admit I'm not a good web developer, but I can hold my own reasonably well with Perl and C in the areas I work in then and now. My first instinct, however, is exactly the opposite of "buy more RAM" or "just let everything in through the firewall." Not saying all, or even most, developers are like that. But a very high percentage of the ones I've seen in action are.
Give them a bug, in your real software product, that traces back to an operating system level setting, and does not initially expose this in the error. (for instance, say max. open files is set to 20 on the box, and a php script opens 100 file handles and doesn't close them) Tell them to trace this, and suggest a fix, and give them a couple of hours. If you can debug an environment you don't know, it proves that you're able to understand new concepts, and even trace weird bugs in them. Any monkey can program PHP, anyone with enough time can get a degree, not much guys know how to find a bug properly and fast.
Quack damn you!
What's the problem? Because a good programmer can find a perm position elsewhere. Unless, of course, you offer is heads and shoulders above anything else, all you're going to get from temp positions are the dregs.
I happen to love doing contract to hire work - I get paid, you get work performed.
If I like the company (and they offer, so far they have), I'll go perm. If not, thank you and I'm on my way :)
The FTE gig is the worst gig ever. Crap wages, crap work, too many hours, and you get laid off with the same notice as a contractor (but are expected to slave 'for the good of the company'). It's no wonder so many places outsource these days.
An operating system should be like a light switch... simple, effective, easy to use, and designed for everyone.
"The COO has come to you, because no one else is available. The CEO is flipping out. There's a server on the network running some common variety of Linux. Transfer rates from it to any other machine are very slow, regardless of the protocol. i.e., http, ftp, rsync, samba are all slow. What do you do?"
OH GOD OH GOD... what wall jack is that server plugged into...what? Not labelled? CRAP! OK, I'll just PING it and look it up in the switch arp table and cross reference the MAC and the switch port... OH NO...THE RDP client on my Blackberry just crashed and I'm in the middle of the highway during rush hour... CRAP. OK, OK...calm down...make up something... OK, um tell the CEO that the server is under service lockdown and frozen due to the upcoming board meeting and potential buyout... yeah...that'll give me a couple of days leeway... whew!
Then, since I'm in the network group, I can just blame it on the server group since they never patch their servers anyway... that E1000 driver never did work properly on Linux, yeah yeah that's what I'll do...
Karma: Excellent. 15 moderator points expire sometime.
I was with you until the yelling part, an interview is a two way street. If I'm getting yelled at in an interview I can only imagine how bad it will be in the workplace.
On second thought, if that's actually how your office functions, then I guess it is honest and appropriate. I just wouldn't want to work there.
If you started yelling at me in an interview, I would walk out. No one who is competent is going to put up with behavior like that. Enjoy your crappy candidates.
Which part of that, specifically, do you find offensive?
It's not offensive so much as funny.
You don't, by chance, do any web programming do you? If so, what's the URL? Just curious is all...
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
Agreed. Meeting a table thumping, yelling person in the interview would just cause me to stand up and say "I'm sorry, I'm looking for a position at a professional organisation". If this sort of situation is routine enough to require somebody to do well in it during an interview then I'd say there are some problems there.
In real situations this doesn't happen. At least in the places I've worked. There was an incident of massive negligence by the support team involving one of our biggest customers databases last year. Instead of someone in management hitting the table and yelling, everyone in the development team already knew it needed to be fixed and so we fixed it. A good team doesn't need yelling at.
It seems to me that the type of managers who yell and ask why are usually the ones in the positions who don't need to know. A good manager will be right there with the team putting forward ideas, not simply asking questions. If they're not going to be putting in ideas then they should get away from the problem and let people get on with it.
Go home and shave your giant head of smell with your bad self
There is also a candidate with a good portfolio, a lot of experience, and no certification.
I don't know this guy but I'm sure he's extremely well qualified for the job and you should hire him ASAP because he's about to miss another mortgage payment.
At my last job, they sat me down in a conference room with a laptop that had the wireless card yanked. They gave me a piece of paper with some database tables and asked me to write a web app that would let someone add, remove and view entries in those tables. They gave you 45 minutes to write a working web app, in the language of your choice, with no outside references and no way to actually run of test any of the code. Along the way I noticed that they had a couple errors in their schema.
We got to talking after the assignment was done and apparently they had been using that hypothetical DB for a long time and nobody had pointed out and fixed the errors. I found that amazing, so I asked how many people had actually finished the assignment. They said that nobody had given them code that actually ran, that there was always a syntax error or plain old typo somewhere. They went on to say that they didn't really count that against anyone since they wanted to see facility with the language of choice, coding style, general knowledge, ability to work under pressure, etc. So I had to ask: "Uh, did my code run?" And it did.
I don't know if it's because of the way I write code or because I've been doing it for a while, but I was just totally blown away that nobody they had interviewed could come up with 400 lines of code that actually ran. They had dudes with advanced CS degrees who couldn't write a simple web app that worked. It's mind boggling.
At the time I was a little scared of the interview process (the practical part was only 1/3 of the total interview process). But I think it's a good method.
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
As I've found, there's always some degree of yelling in high dollar production environments, especially where a few minutes of outage can be the difference between a highly profitable day, or a huge loss. Hell, people freak out when a Windows file share stops working, or Outlook eats their mail. I've never seen a warm fuzzy workplace that involved a production environment and/or deadlines, that didn't have the occasional loud emotional moments.
When I've interviewed, the yelling is only a small part, during the roleplay part. The rest of it was a fun conversation with plenty of joking around. If they can't laugh at my jokes, they won't be very entertaining to work with. :)
The last place I worked at, it was unfortunately an every day occurrence. It was always something, which sometimes included outages at tier 1 providers that we were not directly connected to.
"Oh my god, this guy in [insert random city] called saying he can't reach us! Fix it now!"
[traceroute to see where the problem may be]
"There's an outage on [insert another provider]. We'll have to wait for them to fix it."
"No, call them now! Get it fixed!"
"We're not their customer, I can't call them. They'd just hang up on me."
"Do it anyways, I don't care, get it fixed!"
[calls 3rd party provider, and gets hung up on]
"They hung up on me."
"Call [some sales minion] at [our provider]! He'll get it fixed."
[calls sales minion, gets told he can't do anything]
You see where this goes. About 30 minutes of people running around like idiots, and suddenly like a freakin' miracle the 3rd party provider fixes their problem and the world is saved yet again. Of course, they always want a written report explaining in detail why the outage occurred, and how could we avoid it in the future, and of course the report would need to be read in a lengthy meeting. Multihoming and putting our own network on a better provider with better peering agreements were always shot down, so this whole thing was repeated every few weeks. I liked the options of not answering the phone any more, and investigating the problems after they were already resolved. It made life a lot simpler. :)
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
but some people go out and get the certification so they can get past the HR droid
Yes, this is a massive problem. In order to get to the face-to-face you have to go through the screening process. This is normally carried out either by the HR trainee or, worse, by a recruitment "consultant". All they've been given is a tick-box of "must-haves" (i.e. a wish list of tangible qualities) and told to go through a pile of CVs.
All they'll do is toss the ones which don't meet the criteria.So you can be the best LAMP-er in the world, but unless you have the random qualification that someone though might be useful you don't even get a chance. So while certification bears no correlation to usefulness in the real world, it's a necessary stamp on your CV to get you through the door.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
As others have said, if you yell at me during the interview, I'm not taking the job. If you thump the table during the interview, I'm not taking the job. I find hypothetical questions very hard to diagnose. I had an interview once where they asked me how to solve a problem that I had solved just the week before on the job I had at the time. It took me longer to remember how I diagnosed and resolved the problem than it had taken me to do it.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
But hey, if you can't handle an environment with occasional high stress, I wouldn't want you there.
You seem to be confusing refusal to accept unprofessional behaviour by idiot management with an inability to handle high stress situations. I suggest to you that the kind of person the GP poster is talking about may well be quite capable of handling the stress, but prefers to avoid the problem situation in the first place by working for a more professional organisation instead.
That's the great thing about recruitment processes: they're two-way deals, and revealing in both directions. If the interviewer is an ass, or you're good but your CV doesn't get past the HR weenies for some silly reason, then you can pretty much always bet that the corporate culture is poor and the employer isn't somewhere you want to work anyway, so not getting the interview or walking out early is no problem.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
First step is to run top, not to check the network. Just like the first step, when a car will crank over but won't start, isn't to pop the hood and start fiddling with the wires, but to check the gas gauge.
Always eliminate the easy things first.
Actually, I never had anyone walk out. Since it was presented as roleplay of a real world situation, and I'd explain the details of the situation calmly and clearly, it was evident that it was an extreme example.
What a competent interviewer would do is set up a VM with the problem they want diagnosed. That way, there wouldn't be any need to set up a fake "situation" where the "real fault" can be any number of things, including ones that don't match what you have established in your head.
Of course, if you can't handle an environment with occasional actual preparation for your job (e.g., interviewing), I wouldn't want you to work with me.
That's the last thing I'd ever want is a stressful situation to come up, and an employee walking out because it was "too hard".
Being "yelled at" by a superior is not a "stressful situation". It's unprofessional behavior. Being told politely and calmly that there is a problem that needs to be fixed quickly because the company is losing $X million per hour is a "stressful situation".
You sound like an angry person, having a power trip with a guy who needs a job to make a living. I am sorry if your 'professional' experience involves people doing that to you. I bet you have 'motivational' posters in your office as well. As many others here, I will just walk out of a job interview if yelled at. Yours is yours is just misplaced anger. Grow up.
Egads - it's the whole "Root Cause Analysis" crap. A mile-long report filled with BS that means nothing to anyone else and and action plan of "how to prevent this from happening again" blah blah blah. I always felt those things should be triaged first to determine if the RCA was even under our control. But whatever.
I worked for a hospital in LA that rakes in far too much money than they should and they do those a lot. Usually they would pay the most expensive consultant to write one of those things up for it to only be ignored. They would have already vilified someone (responsible or not) and then just go through the motions.
As far as the interview - deal with it. If you can't stand a little heat stay out of the kitchen. I would probably just laugh at the guy slapping the table and then play along. I would say "Good. We have some spirit here. You there - table slapper. First thing I'll say is use some of that fire and gumption to get the reatrds with their neckties on too tight to get the f**k out of my way while I fix the problem - and be advised, every time you slap the table adds another 1 minute to my problem solving because you're being annoying, and another 10 dollar Starbucks card to feed my liquid crack habit."
And as someone who had to deal with a LAMP server I built on spare parts a few years ago I encountered just such a thing - ARP flux. I still don't understand a lot about it but was able to get it working. And don't knock Google. I don't pretend to have all the answers - never do. I am a jack of all trades, master of none. If all I am is all you got, you'd do well to either have coverage I can count on or a MiFi for me to have unfettered access to resources I've built over the year. Be smart. Leverage your people and their assets they know they can reach.
As to nobody being available and it filters all the way down to me to fix a critical server? Looks like that's the FIRST thing that goes into your RCA before you even THINK of rattling my cage, Mr. Manager. "Business Continuity Planning" - learn it and love it :-)
That said, I am now and always have been happy to roll up my sleeves and try something to help regardless of the circumstances. CIO, CEO, Line Manager or Mary in accounting who blushes at the comment of "I think your mouse has a dirty ball" :-)
One of my favorite things to ask is like what I read a while back on the site "Joelonsoftware". "Build me a house" and hand them a pen. If they just jump up and start writing a square - they lose. Ask questions. Probe a bit. "Who wants the house? Where? Underwater? In space? what's my requirements? I figure if you're asking ME to design a house we're pretty much open to anything."
Does the person have good troubleshooting skills? Are they well rounded? Common sense is not so common much anymore. What kind of things do they like to do as "stretch" things on their own time? I write hospital EDI interfaces for integration engines for a living and I very much enjoy it. It also means what I do touches many, many aspects of programming and system design to get things to work together. Part programmer, part analyst, part teacher, part hardware engineer, part tech support, part application setup, part network guy to help figure out VPN stuff. Being able to get iptrace running on AIX so I can grab a file for bringing in to Wireshark can be helpful too when the ass-hat on the vendor side says I'm sending him 2 of everything and I'm saying he's on crack.
So you wanna slap the table? I'll roll with it and we can laugh about it. I don't take any of that seriously. Be advised I might also stick my finger in your coffee and then taste it and say "Hmm.. A cream and sugar kind of fellow, eh? You should warm that up a bit." right in the middle of your mini flake-out. Someone did that to me years ago and I made the choice right then and there to laugh at that kind of thing. It was either that or I could have just kicked his ass. Of course he was much bigger than me so I was pretty sure I would have had to pack a lunch; since kicking his ass would have most likely been an all-day job. Lucky for both of us I was lazy.
Never have a philosophy which supports a lack of courage
The company I'm at now had an interesting review process: I sat in a cubicle with the two lead developers. One asked me matter-of-fact questions: what would you do in x situation? What is your proficiency with the Linux command-line? How long have you used PHP and how have you used it? Have you ever configured a server? The other programmer, however, had some more interesting questions - bringing up ridiculous scenarios that had simple answers, yet the question itself was laden with red herrings to make you really think about it.
After this interview process, it came time to do a couple quick programming tests: fizz/buzz is a standard here, just to make sure you're sane. There is also a simple "Build an HTML form that submits here, do x y and z with the returned data." Simple tests are usually the best, as we have a sort of wall of shame for people who did not have any clue what they were doing. Example: One person asked if they could install Dreamweaver so he could do the Fizz Buzz. Another wrote in the comments to his HTML form test: "
<!--another API i dont know. Lets see if this gets the job done --!>
<form action="testMe">
<form textfield = "username">
</form>
These are the people you don't want to hire. I understand you're looking for something perhaps more rigorous, but a set of simple, common sense tests is a great starting point. Have them grep a file for a pattern - did they use and/or understand regular expressions? Did they use them when they didn't need to? How about making an .htaccess file that does some basic functionality. Have them create a table with an auto_increment'ing ID and write a form/PHP page to store information in it (and see if they know about basic data sanitizing). And of course, Fizz Buzz!
Weed out the incompetents/overachievers and then take a few for a test run - make sure they understand and conform to your coding standards, make sure they have the ability to learn and understand your processes (how your MVC works, a general understanding or willingness to learn your DB structure, etc).
I've interviewed with them 3 times on the phone (three interviews each). Some of their questions just plain don't make sense. From what other folks have said, it's just to see how you handle stressful situations.
Like this question...
G: "How does telnet work?"
Me: "Can you please clarify the question?"
G: "How does telnet work?"
Me: "Well, it is an application which opens a TCP connection to a server, normally on port 23, but can connect to anyTCP port where you are expecting ASCII data".
G: "Tell me more. How does telnet work?"
This went on for about 10 minutes, where I finally had to give in and say "I must not understand what you're looking for, so I don't have a better answer for you."
During another interview, the interviewer started asking Python questions. I told him that I don't know Python. I'd never touched Python. Python is not listed anywhere on my resume. He spent about 15 minutes on Python questions. During another interview set, where the interviewer was very pleasant and did ask me questions in my skill set, what the Python questions were all about. He said that there was a little holy war over there. Half the company wanted to use Perl. The other half wanted to use Python. It was a constant conflict. As with most holy wars, lots of people have their preference, but don't make a big deal about it. Others will make a huge deal over it just for the sake of doing it. That interviewer probably had a hard on for Python, and didn't want any non-python people on the team.
In all 3 sets of interviews, I was always interviewing for sysadmin positions, so I thought it was very odd to get in depth questions regarding programming, except for maybe some basic shell scripting. I've known sysadmins who couldn't write the first line of code, but I prefer the ones who can at least modify easy shell scripts. :)
You got the trip to their office though? Congrats. I'm hoping to get that invitation sometime soon.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
You have to deal with stress, but not disrespect or yelling. The problem there is the yeller, and I don't know a single workplace I've ever been in where someone acting like that wouldn't be disciplined or fired. In fact, the few who I've seen try that *were* fired. If someone came in yelling at me I'd tell him to fuck up and refuse to work on the issue until he came back calm. We are not your whipping boys, you will treat your employees in a respectful manner, or you'll get either nothing from them or their resignation, like you deserve.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
You said this:
For the sake of the scenario, ... you are sitting at a desk where you have both any tools required on your desktop, ...
And this:
Some just stare at you dumbfounded without a clue if they don't have Google in front of them.
Not to be a jerk, but make up your mind. For many purposes, Google is an invaluable tool. The skill you want is the ability to think for one's self--and some may have enough knowledge to know which keywords to look for.
... And maybe I'm good enough to be picky, but I wouldn't want to work for anyone who yelled at me (even role-playing) in an interview.