Re: How many bytes per Italian character?

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In article news:<i5gf13981jc3tn9c2gqht8hsrt5e62cl9k@xxxxxxx>, Joseph M.
Newcomer wrote:
I tend to despise these kinds of questions in an interview.

Interview questions are SUCH a difficult topic. In one interview I was
asked a set of questions about obscure scanf format strings -- which I
completely failed to answer because I never use scanf.

As luck would have it I got a contract for a different piece of work at the
same company a while later and got into some interesting discussions about
interviews with the guy who had interviewed me. He admitted to having as
little clue as most people in the industry about technical interviews and
we tried to come up with some good questions together.

At the time Gimpel (the people who sell PC Lint) were running their long
series of advertisements showing subtle C bugs that their lint tool could
find, and I suggested that asking a candidate to comment on those code
snippets might prove informative -- and if the candidate had seen the
problems before that probably didn't matter as that showed that the
candidate read the magazines that carried the adverts, which itself was a
good sign.

I recently suggested to a colleague that a good interview test might be to
ask the candidate to write a short book review of a recent book on C++ (or
other relevant subject). The level of understanding revealed by the review
itself should be a sufficient indicator of the technical competence of the
candidate. Furthermore, I said, this would help to identify people who
actually read books -- anyone who didn't could safely be discarded -- and
would also help to identify people with good literary and communication
skills. These skills, I suggested, were at least as important as technical
knowledge.

He said, "No, don't be daft. Most programmers can't write for toffee!"

I thought the point was that he didn't want to employ "most programmers".

Cheers,
Daniel.


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