Interview questions

Just been reading this post about interview questions, and want to put together a quick list of tasks I want to ask developers to perform during interviews. I’ve been thinking about this a lot over the last couple of months as we’ve interviewed about a dozen developers and the selection process is definitely flawed. A couple of guys who convinced me they were competent developers were two finger typists. Nothing makes your heart sink more than when someone you’ve just hired starts their first day and takes 1 minute to stab out their user name and password when they login for the first time.

Anyway, here’s the list of tasks I’m going to flesh out and start asking interviewees to do:

• Reverse a string
• Swap two values
• Write the output from a program involving inheritance and scope
• Iterate through a linked list
• Write a Pig Latin translator

What I’d like to do is ask for a mixture of pen-and-paper answers and IDE-based answers. The last item on the list definitely lends itself to an IDE implementation.

The above link and others I’ve been reading this evening came from this page.

I got ID

So I rocked up to the Venetian today at about 3.45 to register for MIX. There weren’t many there so I breezed through and had my tag and goodie bag by 4.15. Nice! So then it was on to the Pit…

When entering the Pit, immediately to your left is one of the biggest deals for Microsoft this year – Microsoft Surface. We were given a demonstration of the various sample applications we’ve seen before, as well as the opprtunity to try the surface out. It’s works essentially as advertised – multi-touch and very intuitive. I wasn’t massively impressed by the response times; even in the simple Paint application, you didn’t have to move your finger very quickly before the brush would lag behind. I suppose it’s having to do a lot of calculating behind the scenes (it’s running on top of Vista for god’s sake), but it definitely detracts from the illusion that you’re manipulating virtually-tactile screen objects. Sometimes it just plain can’t keep up and misses subtle actions. And when I go back and look at Jeff Han’s multi-touch display demonstration at TED 2006, I just hope the market doesn’t get flooded with Microsoft’s offering before he can get a foothold. His one is just sexier, isn’t it?

Also at the Pit are various labs, for Silverlight, Windows Live and ASP.Net AJAX. The Silverlight labs are Silverlight 1.0 unfortunately, but one of the helpers assured me that after tomorrow’s keynotes there will be Silverlight 2.0 labs available. Totally looking forward to it.

I had a quick lookie at the Rock Band stage, just in time to see three slightly confused guys ‘playing’ (inputting?) Weezer’s Say It Aint So. I haven’t played Rock Band or even Guitar Hero, and I have no intention to, ever. But it’s a pretty good game for spectators, I have to say.

In the goodie bag was a MIX t-shirt (I underestimated my shirt size…), program guides, trial versions of electric rain’s StandOut, ZAM32 and swift.3D software, Telerik RadControls for Silverlight, an Infragistics Resource DVD and a DVD of Visual Studio 2008 Standard Edition, which I’m installing right now. Nice.

Also had the pleasure of meeting Karl Shifflett and Chris Love, at Denny’s no less. Total coincidence – I sit down and order, and next to me are these two guys discussing their blogs and the .Net community; Chris was wearing a Silverlight t-shirt. I took a stab: “Uh, excuse me… are you guys here for the MIX conference by any chance?” Naturally they looked at me as if I was an idiot (or a lunatic!), and said yes. Had a nice chat with them and Karl mentioned he’ll be coming over for DDD in Glasgow in May. Really nice to meet you both – hopefully I’ll see you again over the next few days. Probably at the BlogZone?

Looking forward to tomorrow!