Orchid XP v7 wrote:
> Darren New wrote:
> 
>> Last time I was interviewing, I asked people
>>
>> "Write a program that prints the prime numbers from 2 to N, where N is 
>> passed on the command line."
>>
>> The first three "experienced programmers" we were hiring couldn't 
>> manage that with 30 minutes and hints.
> 
> Maybe they don't know what a "prime number" is? 

That was the "with hints." They not only knew what a prime number was, I 
basically told them the algorithm. As in "find all the numbers between 2 
and N which, when you divide them by every other number, they don't come 
out even."

> OOC, are prime numbers [or number theory generally] relevant to what 
> you're hiring these people for?

It wasn't. It was just a simple "are you blowing smoke on your resume" 
test.  Kind of like the guys who say "print the numbers from 1 to 100, 
but substitute "foo" for every number divisible by 5, and "bar" for ever 
divisible by 7, and "zoop" for ever divisible by both".  Amazing the 
number of people who choke under the simplest pressure, even if they 
*do* know how to program.



Similarly, one place I worked, Jerry Hall was the system admin for unix 
machines. He interviewed about 40 people before they could answer his 
three "troll questions". And when he showed me, *I* knew the answers.

1) You have two machines on a network. One has a big disk, the other has 
a tape drive and small disk. You have a tar tape with too much 
information to fit on the small disk. How do you untar it onto the big disk?

2) In the ls-listing drwxrsxrwx what does the s mean?  (Note that if you 
said "look in the ls man page" or even what the name of the flag is, it 
was good enough, even if you didn't know the semantics the flag implied.)

I don't remember what the third one was, but it was pretty much the same 
level. The sort of thing which, if you don't know how to solve it, you 
certainly shouldn't know the root password.

I also have a list of "interview questions" for testing the breadth of 
someone's knowledge. If I was ever hiring someone as a primary 
programmer for a new and growing company, I'd want them to know more 
than just Web2.0 javascripting. :-)

-- 
   Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
     "That's pretty. Where's that?"
          "It's the Age of Channelwood."
     "We should go there on vacation some time."

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