NYCPHP Meetup

[Christopher R. Merlo]

On 6/28/07, Ben Sgro (ProjectSkyline) <ben at projectskyline.com> wrote:
>
>  Good Morning,
>
> In a few days, I will be sitting down with a perspective employee,
> and I'd like to get some feedback on good programming questions
> or excercises I can have them work on.
>

I think this mostly depends on what you want the employee to do once he/she
is employed.  If the job is mostly OO class design, then ask candidates to
create a class to represent, say, a shopping cart, or a customer.  If the
job is mostly design, then create a boring HTML page and ask them to mark it
up for proper application of CSS, or design on paper (without any code) a
user interface for some part of your overall project.

That being said, if I were in your shoes, I would try to gauge the
candidate's level of understanding regarding certain key areas (inheritance,
comments, modularity, etc.), as opposed to how much stuff they have
memorized or can look up.  My first programming gig straight out of school
was cleaning up legacy code, and so in class I always emphasize the
importance of looking at code you've never seen before, figuring out what it
does, and figuring out ways to improve upon it.  So, once again, depending
on the actual job description, I might take some ugly code (in any real work
environment, there should be no shortage of that :), print it out, and give
the candidate a pad and a pen, or a text editor, and say "Clean this up.
I'll be back in 20 minutes."
-c
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