I plan on hiring a programmer or two on a part time basis. These will be undergraduates in Computer Science. What kinds of questions would you ask to determine a programmers competence during an interview?<p>Edit: Im looking for Javascript and python programmers
I found this post by Steve Yegge to be really helpful, it's aimed at phone screening but you can easily extend it to a face to face interview<p><a href="http://steve.yegge.googlepages.com/five-essential-phone-screen-questions" rel="nofollow">http://steve.yegge.googlepages.com/five-essential-phone-scre...</a>
I'd bookmarked those posts:
- <a href="http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/GuerrillaInterviewing3.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/GuerrillaInterviewing...</a>
- <a href="http://www.inter-sections.net/2007/11/13/how-to-recognise-a-good-programmer/" rel="nofollow">http://www.inter-sections.net/2007/11/13/how-to-recognise-a-...</a> (was a good post, but does not seem to be available anymore - it's in google cache though)<p>Also, since xmarks told me that those links were well ranked in the "hiring" category, you could look at other links from there:
<a href="http://www.xmarks.com/topic/hiring" rel="nofollow">http://www.xmarks.com/topic/hiring</a><p>For example, <a href="http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/hiring" rel="nofollow">http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/hiring</a> and <a href="http://www.artima.com/wbc/interprogP.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.artima.com/wbc/interprogP.html</a> seem interesting
Personally, i found that typical programmer interviews are a waste of time. I played both sides of the table and now I just ask for a small project as a sample to be written and brought to the interview and then discussed.<p>The discussion reveals a lot about the candidate from coding style to design decisions and shortcuts made. I am especially interested in the shortcuts and that the candidate understands what's wrong with them and have them explain why he/she took that route.<p>The sample can be as easy as a command line todo application or any utility that should take just a couple of hours to make.<p>Granted i don't do a lot of interviews, but when i did that's what i asked for. My boss on the other hand does typical interviews and the quality of the candidates shortlisted shows.