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Ovid (2709)
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Stuff with the Perl Foundation. A couple of patches in the Perl core. A few CPAN modules. That about sums it up.
You never can tell
Just finished interviewing two programmers. One we thought of as a junior developer and the other seemed to be much more mature in his coding ability. As it turns out, the "junior" turned in a much more mature program for his coding test and, though he had a slight bug, I was pleasantly suprised. The one I thought would be better just threw a bunch of code in a while loop, didn't modularize anything, used 'chop' instead of 'chomp', didn't know how to use Perl's time functions (though he had both Perldoc and Programming Perl available) and generally turned in something that I simply wasn't too impressed with.
The test, incidentally, was basically to display a menu which allowed you to list a log file (in the format of your choice), add a datestamped entry to the log file or exit. Pretty simple stuff that I whipped out in five minutes. Both of them took almost half an hour
I pour myself a cup of strong coffee. :-)
-- Jarkko Hietaniemi
Test taking ability (Score:3, Interesting)
Also, did you make them write it down on paper? I absolutely hate trying to program in pen. I've been tempted to walk out of interviews when I see them take out the xerox of questions...
There, I feel much better now. Maybe I should start using my own blog.
-sam
Reply to This
Re:Test taking ability (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually, I think you probably would be better for the job. I'm a good test taker as well, but this is limited to the classic multiple choice tests where the elimination strategy works 80% of the time. The sort of test discussed here is a little different: if you can sit down with a manual of a language never seen and whip out a working and correct program then you can probably pick up everything you need about the language to get your job done. Yeah, you're missing idioms and other features you can reall
Re:Test taking ability (Score:2)
But I'm still really concerned that you'd be missing out on some fantastic programmers that have a different psychology.
-sam
Re:Test taking ability (Score:2)
I can almost see your point, but the nature of the questions that we pose to candidates are so basic (e.g.: what's the potential performance impact of nested loops?) that I am very concerned about someone's inability to respond to them. In contrast, in the Perlmonks thread I started on this topic, someone mentioned writing a routine to go through a binary tree without recursion. While this was described as simple, I find that I encounter nested loops far more frequently than binary trees. I could easily
Re:Test taking ability (Score:2)
Good question. The questions are here [perlmonks.org] and we do ask that they sketch out the answer to the second question. The rest we can just discuss as I want to know how they think, not necessarily whether or not they get the answer right. Now, if I had difficult questions, I think this could be more problematic.
As for test taking ability, to a certain extent, some of us could argue that this is what all programming is about. The boss runs in screaming "Oh shoot! The knerflebitz aren't fribitgizting! What do w