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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> 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?

OK, I have no clue how to do that.

But then, I don't know how to do almost anything network-related in Unix 
beyond configuring the IP address and default gateway.

> 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.)

Hmm. Isn't that SetUID or Sticky or something?

> 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.

And that's the difference: I wouldn't be applying for a Unix sysadmin 
job. ;-) [Or at least, not unless they provide nontrivial training first...]

> 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. :-)

I'm still fuzzy on exactly what the hell "Web 2.0" actually is. Does 
anybody actually have a definition for it?

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

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On Sat, 08 Mar 2008 20:55:28 +0100, Orchid XP v7 <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> I'm still fuzzy on exactly what the hell "Web 2.0" actually is.

It is a fuzzy term.


> Does anybody actually have a definition for it?

Sort of:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2.0


-- 
FE

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Fredrik Eriksson wrote:
> On Sat, 08 Mar 2008 20:55:28 +0100, Orchid XP v7 <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
>> I'm still fuzzy on exactly what the hell "Web 2.0" actually is.
> 
> It is a fuzzy term.

That's more or less what I thought. (Or I'd have shut up by now...)

>> Does anybody actually have a definition for it?
> 
> Sort of:
> 
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2.0

Riiiight...

So it's like Web 1.0, but more enterprisy? :-D

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

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Orchid XP v7 wrote:
> Hmm. Isn't that SetUID or Sticky or something?

That's better than many of the people he interviewed to be a sysadmin.

> I'm still fuzzy on exactly what the hell "Web 2.0" actually is. Does 
> anybody actually have a definition for it?

You know what "B2B" and "B2C" means? Business to Business and Business 
to Consumer? I think most of the Web 2.0 stuff is "Consumer to Consumer".

Of course, it started off as a marketing term. O'Reilly said "Let's call 
it Web 2.0. What will it be about?"

There are other terms you should be familiar with too:

"Developer's Wiki" - We're too lazy to actually write documentation on 
how to use the system, so we let the users reverse-engineer it and 
maintain the documentation for us. This has the additional advantage of 
having all documentation inaccessible whenever our server is down, which 
is often, because we don't care enough to write the documentation in the 
first place. And *another* advantage that there's no good starting 
point, and no way to know when the feature you're looking for *isn't* 
available!

"XML" - We're too lazy to document our data interchange formats, so 
we're hoping that by using an inefficient format, it'll include enough 
information that you can guess what we mean by looking at examples. 
Plus, it lets us pretend to parse it correctly by writing simple but 
incorrect code ourselves!

"REST" - Rather than use an RPC format that is capable of being 
generated automatically like SOAP, which (like XML) we don't really 
understand, we're going to use a catchy phrase like "REST" which is 
completely inapplicable in all practical implementations. Plus, it gives 
us the advantage of making you reimplement all parsing and security 
mechanisms for every service with which you interact.

-- 
   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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