Gail Shaw wrote:

>> PS. Apparently "I see plenty of people who claim to know SQL who do
>> worse than you did. You're really underselling yourself, Andrew. I
>> wasn't even expecting you to ATTEMPT those last few..."
> 
> Yup. I see that too. People claiming to have 4 years of SQL experience and
> can't write a  basic select statement

Yeah, well, like I said, the test was pretty basic. I was expecting them 
to test me on something, like, hard...

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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"Orchid XP v7" <voi### [at] devnull> wrote in message
news:47d26114$1@news.povray.org...
> Gail Shaw wrote:
>
> >> PS. Apparently "I see plenty of people who claim to know SQL who do
> >> worse than you did. You're really underselling yourself, Andrew. I
> >> wasn't even expecting you to ATTEMPT those last few..."
> >
> > Yup. I see that too. People claiming to have 4 years of SQL experience
and
> > can't write a  basic select statement
>
> Yeah, well, like I said, the test was pretty basic. I was expecting them
> to test me on something, like, hard...

That last question wasn't exactly easy.

Still, a lot of the people I get to interview wouldn't do well on that test.

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>> Yeah, well, like I said, the test was pretty basic. I was expecting them
>> to test me on something, like, hard...
> 
> That last question wasn't exactly easy.
> 
> Still, a lot of the people I get to interview wouldn't do well on that test.

As I said, most of the questions were like "list all the posts that have 
more than 10 posts, sorted in date order". Really taxing...

[In case it isn't clear, you'd need to perform a join for that. But even 
so...]

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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"Orchid XP v7" <voi### [at] devnull> wrote in message
news:47d27e74@news.povray.org...
> >> Yeah, well, like I said, the test was pretty basic. I was expecting
them
> >> to test me on something, like, hard...
> >
> > That last question wasn't exactly easy.
> >
> > Still, a lot of the people I get to interview wouldn't do well on that
test.
>
> As I said, most of the questions were like "list all the posts that have
> more than 10 posts, sorted in date order". Really taxing...

And as I said, a large number of people I've interviewed would have done
really badly on that.

Do I have to repeat myself any more times? I did comprehend what you wrote
first time.

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Orchid XP v7 wrote:
> Yeah, well, like I said, the test was pretty basic. I was expecting them 
> to test me on something, like, hard...

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.

-- 
   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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Kyle wrote:
> I can tell you for sure that I wouldn't have been able to pull that our of my butt
on the fly while testing.  I would have had an idea of how to do it, but would't
recall the syntax.

I believe there's a way simpler way of doing it that doesn't use any 
trinary operators or server-specific features.  It's brutally 
inefficient, but that wasn't a criterion. :-)

I'll go pull it out of the code I wrote to solve exactly this problem, 
next time I'm in that partition.

-- 
   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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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? (A surprising number of 
people don't know this. And of the ones who know what one is, a 
surprising number of them can't figure out how to FIND such numbers, or 
even CHECK one...)

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

OTOH, it may just be that they're not very good programmers. ;-)

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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> Maybe they don't know what a "prime number" is? (A surprising number of 
> people don't know this. And of the ones who know what one is, a 
> surprising number of them can't figure out how to FIND such numbers, or 
> even CHECK one...)

Isn't that elementary school stuff?

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Nicolas Alvarez wrote:

>> Maybe they don't know what a "prime number" is? (A surprising number 
>> of people don't know this. And of the ones who know what one is, a 
>> surprising number of them can't figure out how to FIND such numbers, 
>> or even CHECK one...)
> 
> Isn't that elementary school stuff?

Depends.

I went through my entire school career without ever having heard of a 
"prime number". I learned that when I went to college. Not because it 
was on the syllabus, but because I was bored so I spent 2 years *living* 
in the college library...

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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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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