Why interviews involve silly questions (continuation of the Joel on SW thread)?
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I was going through the Joel-on-software thread as quickly as my extremely unhurried ISP speeds would allow me to, and I found that there is a good crowd here who intensely dislike being asked what they believe are stupid questions. I don’t think any of them has done an interview in South India (Madras, Trivandrum, Bangalore etc). For my previous company we had a requirement to take in 6 programmers and we put an Ad in the newspaper for the same. Within 2 weeks we got approximately 2500 resumes sent in to us through email/postal mail. This included freshers, people with experience and even people who were currently employed. The only solution to get to a smaller input chunk was to filter the trash out through a test paper (80% of which was prepared by me – the remaining 20% was Java). The portions I asked consisted of some rather basic to intermediate level questions on C++, the Win32 API, elementary programming aspects etc. and I also included a section that queried their English Language skills. I am of the opinion that any person who manages to become good enough in a foreign language (and English is foreign here) should have enough IQ to learn enough programming for most company requirements. Anyway from that list we still got over a 100 candidates, who we thought were quite okay or among whom we couldn’t make further ranking reasonably accurate. So we had to create two interview panels and do a first round interview and the two panels together came out with a list of 14 candidates who were quite good, and then we had to do a final interview to eventually select the final 6 (of which at least one, perhaps even two candidates had to be taken because of pressure from higher ups). As you can see, in situations like this, you have no choice but to try and filter out the good candidates by asking questions that might be categorized as silly, insulting. Saying that, it’s insulting to be asked what a virtual function is, is the same as an integer saying that he found it insulting when he had to allow himself to be divided by 2 to prove his even-hood ;-) When there are 3000 integers when we want just one, you really have to go through some filtering. Nish p.s. My bandwidth won't allow me to do a fair participation on pages beyond the first few on the Lounge, which is why I had to start a new thread.
"I'm a bit bored at the moment so I'm thinking about writing a new programming language" - Colin Davies My book :-
I'm sorry mate I disagree still although you have put up a good arguement. The comment about the foreign language is dead on. I'd give extra points on number of languages spoken. With reference to the past post, I considered the questions trivial because they appeared to be in the final interview stage, and not the weeding stage. Things like being able to solve a logic puzzle or problem I would also find useful in determining how people could code. I believe with real RAD languages knowing how to program isn't really as important as having an understanding of other issues. Also at issue here seems to be the quality of the candidates. As to the virtual function, A better question would be "Why and how would you turn a virtual function into a virtual definition." Something like this would eliminate the folk who know trivia. Regardz Colin J Davies
*** WARNING *
This could be addictive
**The minion's version of "Catch :bob: "It's a real shame that people as stupid as you can work out how to use a computer. said by Christian Graus in the Soapbox
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I'm sorry mate I disagree still although you have put up a good arguement. The comment about the foreign language is dead on. I'd give extra points on number of languages spoken. With reference to the past post, I considered the questions trivial because they appeared to be in the final interview stage, and not the weeding stage. Things like being able to solve a logic puzzle or problem I would also find useful in determining how people could code. I believe with real RAD languages knowing how to program isn't really as important as having an understanding of other issues. Also at issue here seems to be the quality of the candidates. As to the virtual function, A better question would be "Why and how would you turn a virtual function into a virtual definition." Something like this would eliminate the folk who know trivia. Regardz Colin J Davies
*** WARNING *
This could be addictive
**The minion's version of "Catch :bob: "It's a real shame that people as stupid as you can work out how to use a computer. said by Christian Graus in the Soapbox
>> Why and how would you turn a virtual function into a virtual definition << And so, you would expect "foreign language" guy to understand what you mean? I don't... Or maybe you are talking about COM Interface virtual definition? Or VPN Virtual definition? I hate such questions even more then just "What is virtual function..." "...Ability to type is not enough to become a Programmer. Unless you type in VB. But then again you have to type really fast..." Me
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I was going through the Joel-on-software thread as quickly as my extremely unhurried ISP speeds would allow me to, and I found that there is a good crowd here who intensely dislike being asked what they believe are stupid questions. I don’t think any of them has done an interview in South India (Madras, Trivandrum, Bangalore etc). For my previous company we had a requirement to take in 6 programmers and we put an Ad in the newspaper for the same. Within 2 weeks we got approximately 2500 resumes sent in to us through email/postal mail. This included freshers, people with experience and even people who were currently employed. The only solution to get to a smaller input chunk was to filter the trash out through a test paper (80% of which was prepared by me – the remaining 20% was Java). The portions I asked consisted of some rather basic to intermediate level questions on C++, the Win32 API, elementary programming aspects etc. and I also included a section that queried their English Language skills. I am of the opinion that any person who manages to become good enough in a foreign language (and English is foreign here) should have enough IQ to learn enough programming for most company requirements. Anyway from that list we still got over a 100 candidates, who we thought were quite okay or among whom we couldn’t make further ranking reasonably accurate. So we had to create two interview panels and do a first round interview and the two panels together came out with a list of 14 candidates who were quite good, and then we had to do a final interview to eventually select the final 6 (of which at least one, perhaps even two candidates had to be taken because of pressure from higher ups). As you can see, in situations like this, you have no choice but to try and filter out the good candidates by asking questions that might be categorized as silly, insulting. Saying that, it’s insulting to be asked what a virtual function is, is the same as an integer saying that he found it insulting when he had to allow himself to be divided by 2 to prove his even-hood ;-) When there are 3000 integers when we want just one, you really have to go through some filtering. Nish p.s. My bandwidth won't allow me to do a fair participation on pages beyond the first few on the Lounge, which is why I had to start a new thread.
"I'm a bit bored at the moment so I'm thinking about writing a new programming language" - Colin Davies My book :-
Several years ago I applied for a position as a Windows C++ programmer. Part of the interview process involved writing a bunch of small routines and a short program to prove you knew what you were babbling about in the interview. However, the language of choice for this test was Turbo Pascal for DOS! You were given much time as you needed (on a saturday), the IDE (compiler, linker etc), the online help and even a sample program written by someone at the company that showed you everything you needed to know - provided you know the first thing about programming ;) After I got the job :cool:, I was asked what I thought about using Turbo Pascal. At first I thought it was the dumbest thing in the world, but after talking to the lead programmer it sort of made sense. It was designed to get rid of the clueless majority that can't think outside of their "native" language and also to force people to create basic routines that are taken for granted by todays developers. (One of the questions was to write a routine to sort a string of characters into alpha order and one VB programmer asked where the 'sort' function was in Pascal :rolleyes: ) Ironically, after trying in vain to get my project leader to grasp the fundamentals of COM (ie. language independence) and being forced to write code in Delphi after getting a C++ position, and then having a heated argument with the CEO, I walked out six weeks later :-O . Of course, this was back in the nineties - today, I just bite my tongue and do exactly what I'm told :(
There are 10 kinds of people - those that get binary and those that don't.
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I'll second Nish, though not the India portion (i'd assumed all Indians were as smart as Smitha - thanks for clearing that up). Just finished interviewing for a new position in our group - being in a college town in the Midwest, surrounded by college students, these sort of "insulting" questions are lucky to get answered - we do more training than the Uni does i think sometimes. Not everyone's a powerful industry veteran hiring the Best and the Brightest and the Most Expensive Experienced... ;)
Shog9
Let your mercy spill / On all these burning hearts in hell If it be your will / To make us well...
Shog9 wrote: i'd assumed all Indians were as smart as Smitha What was the provocation? :~ :laugh: Smitha You are never given a wish without also being given the power to make it true. You may have to work for it, however. -- Richard Bach
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I was going through the Joel-on-software thread as quickly as my extremely unhurried ISP speeds would allow me to, and I found that there is a good crowd here who intensely dislike being asked what they believe are stupid questions. I don’t think any of them has done an interview in South India (Madras, Trivandrum, Bangalore etc). For my previous company we had a requirement to take in 6 programmers and we put an Ad in the newspaper for the same. Within 2 weeks we got approximately 2500 resumes sent in to us through email/postal mail. This included freshers, people with experience and even people who were currently employed. The only solution to get to a smaller input chunk was to filter the trash out through a test paper (80% of which was prepared by me – the remaining 20% was Java). The portions I asked consisted of some rather basic to intermediate level questions on C++, the Win32 API, elementary programming aspects etc. and I also included a section that queried their English Language skills. I am of the opinion that any person who manages to become good enough in a foreign language (and English is foreign here) should have enough IQ to learn enough programming for most company requirements. Anyway from that list we still got over a 100 candidates, who we thought were quite okay or among whom we couldn’t make further ranking reasonably accurate. So we had to create two interview panels and do a first round interview and the two panels together came out with a list of 14 candidates who were quite good, and then we had to do a final interview to eventually select the final 6 (of which at least one, perhaps even two candidates had to be taken because of pressure from higher ups). As you can see, in situations like this, you have no choice but to try and filter out the good candidates by asking questions that might be categorized as silly, insulting. Saying that, it’s insulting to be asked what a virtual function is, is the same as an integer saying that he found it insulting when he had to allow himself to be divided by 2 to prove his even-hood ;-) When there are 3000 integers when we want just one, you really have to go through some filtering. Nish p.s. My bandwidth won't allow me to do a fair participation on pages beyond the first few on the Lounge, which is why I had to start a new thread.
"I'm a bit bored at the moment so I'm thinking about writing a new programming language" - Colin Davies My book :-
> I am of the opinion that any person who manages to become > good enough in a foreign language (and English is foreign > here) should have enough IQ to learn enough programming > for most company requirements. tough i understand that every company have their own recruitment policies, i got to disagree with this one. english is foreign langauge here and in my opinion knowledge in foreign langauge doesnt mean that IQ is good. i learnt english just for the sake of communicating my ideas to other people who doesnt understand mine, english being language spoken by most. but i havent gone any farther in it like mastering vocabulary etc., but i am very proficient in my mother tounge and learnt all grammer in it and can write and appreciate poems, novels etc etc., point is, knowledge in foreign language doesnt mean IQ is great. just my 2 cents
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I was going through the Joel-on-software thread as quickly as my extremely unhurried ISP speeds would allow me to, and I found that there is a good crowd here who intensely dislike being asked what they believe are stupid questions. I don’t think any of them has done an interview in South India (Madras, Trivandrum, Bangalore etc). For my previous company we had a requirement to take in 6 programmers and we put an Ad in the newspaper for the same. Within 2 weeks we got approximately 2500 resumes sent in to us through email/postal mail. This included freshers, people with experience and even people who were currently employed. The only solution to get to a smaller input chunk was to filter the trash out through a test paper (80% of which was prepared by me – the remaining 20% was Java). The portions I asked consisted of some rather basic to intermediate level questions on C++, the Win32 API, elementary programming aspects etc. and I also included a section that queried their English Language skills. I am of the opinion that any person who manages to become good enough in a foreign language (and English is foreign here) should have enough IQ to learn enough programming for most company requirements. Anyway from that list we still got over a 100 candidates, who we thought were quite okay or among whom we couldn’t make further ranking reasonably accurate. So we had to create two interview panels and do a first round interview and the two panels together came out with a list of 14 candidates who were quite good, and then we had to do a final interview to eventually select the final 6 (of which at least one, perhaps even two candidates had to be taken because of pressure from higher ups). As you can see, in situations like this, you have no choice but to try and filter out the good candidates by asking questions that might be categorized as silly, insulting. Saying that, it’s insulting to be asked what a virtual function is, is the same as an integer saying that he found it insulting when he had to allow himself to be divided by 2 to prove his even-hood ;-) When there are 3000 integers when we want just one, you really have to go through some filtering. Nish p.s. My bandwidth won't allow me to do a fair participation on pages beyond the first few on the Lounge, which is why I had to start a new thread.
"I'm a bit bored at the moment so I'm thinking about writing a new programming language" - Colin Davies My book :-
I agree with you that we need to do some kind of elimination at the premilinary stage itself so as to not waste time with incompetent people. But all this can be done in the beginning stage itself, not in the final stage of selection. If it's a written test going on, you can add some "good" questions too. This will also help you rank the selected people based on their performance in the written test.
Regards,Rohit Sinha
Do not wait for leaders; do it alone, person to person.
- Mother Teresa -
> I am of the opinion that any person who manages to become > good enough in a foreign language (and English is foreign > here) should have enough IQ to learn enough programming > for most company requirements. tough i understand that every company have their own recruitment policies, i got to disagree with this one. english is foreign langauge here and in my opinion knowledge in foreign langauge doesnt mean that IQ is good. i learnt english just for the sake of communicating my ideas to other people who doesnt understand mine, english being language spoken by most. but i havent gone any farther in it like mastering vocabulary etc., but i am very proficient in my mother tounge and learnt all grammer in it and can write and appreciate poems, novels etc etc., point is, knowledge in foreign language doesnt mean IQ is great. just my 2 cents
Ganesh Ramaswamy wrote: knowledge in foreign language doesnt mean IQ is great I can see that. :laugh: (Just kidding, don't take it otherwise. Old habits die hard.) In fact, I almost agree with you. In India, almost all the educated people can understand/read/write/speak/thumbprint/whatever English. When a kid goes to school, he's automatically taught English. There is no choice in almost all the cases. I'd like to see people who learnt another Indian language out of their own choice. For example, south Indians learning Hindi, or north Indians learning one of the south Indian languages. Even then basic proficiency in a language has nothing to do with IQ, IMO. But I've seen vocabulary questions in all the IQ tests, so it must have something to do with it.
Regards,Rohit Sinha
Do not wait for leaders; do it alone, person to person.
- Mother Teresa -
Shog9 wrote: Not everyone's a powerful industry veteran hiring the Best and the Brightest and the Most Expensive Experienced... You don't think that knowing what a virtual function is is part of the bare minimum of being a profesional C++ programmer? :rolleyes: :laugh: People who don't know that, or how source control works, or modular programming (never mind OO) have no business selling their services as a professional computer programmer. You wouldn't accept that level of competence in an accountant or surgeon or lawyer, yet these people are writing our financial systems, nuclear power plant monitoring systems, everything!
"Sucks less" isn't progress - Kent Beck [^] Awasu 1.1 [^]: A free RSS reader with support for Code Project.
Taka Muraoka wrote: People who don't know that, or how source control works, or modular programming (never mind OO) have no business selling their services as a professional computer programmer bollocks. Most systems in use these days are written with C code. Only a few fraction projects use MFC, or any another virtual-hungry framework. Even with that in hand, the really purposed and proper use of virtual is ironical. Most often, in the code I see, virtual is put by default because either of these : - there was a virtual modifier in the header, and when someone had to add a new method, then he just replicated the pattern. - virtual is automatically used when you derive a method from a base class. Taking advantage of InternetExplorer to steal user's name and password. Taking advantage of InternetExplorer to steal user's clipboard.
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I was going through the Joel-on-software thread as quickly as my extremely unhurried ISP speeds would allow me to, and I found that there is a good crowd here who intensely dislike being asked what they believe are stupid questions. I don’t think any of them has done an interview in South India (Madras, Trivandrum, Bangalore etc). For my previous company we had a requirement to take in 6 programmers and we put an Ad in the newspaper for the same. Within 2 weeks we got approximately 2500 resumes sent in to us through email/postal mail. This included freshers, people with experience and even people who were currently employed. The only solution to get to a smaller input chunk was to filter the trash out through a test paper (80% of which was prepared by me – the remaining 20% was Java). The portions I asked consisted of some rather basic to intermediate level questions on C++, the Win32 API, elementary programming aspects etc. and I also included a section that queried their English Language skills. I am of the opinion that any person who manages to become good enough in a foreign language (and English is foreign here) should have enough IQ to learn enough programming for most company requirements. Anyway from that list we still got over a 100 candidates, who we thought were quite okay or among whom we couldn’t make further ranking reasonably accurate. So we had to create two interview panels and do a first round interview and the two panels together came out with a list of 14 candidates who were quite good, and then we had to do a final interview to eventually select the final 6 (of which at least one, perhaps even two candidates had to be taken because of pressure from higher ups). As you can see, in situations like this, you have no choice but to try and filter out the good candidates by asking questions that might be categorized as silly, insulting. Saying that, it’s insulting to be asked what a virtual function is, is the same as an integer saying that he found it insulting when he had to allow himself to be divided by 2 to prove his even-hood ;-) When there are 3000 integers when we want just one, you really have to go through some filtering. Nish p.s. My bandwidth won't allow me to do a fair participation on pages beyond the first few on the Lounge, which is why I had to start a new thread.
"I'm a bit bored at the moment so I'm thinking about writing a new programming language" - Colin Davies My book :-
Some companies have policies like recruit sr. people only through referrals, that way they can be assured of minimum quality and the person who comes for the inteview knows a bit about what to expect from the company. Though at times its silly to ask questions like that to a senior guy, its unfortunate the market also has people who would not know answer to some basic questions (probably this virtual fn. thing is too basic) :-),as Tom said a guy with true knowledge would be really pissed off and would start having second thoughts about joining the company. Regards, Kannan
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Shog9 wrote: Not everyone's a powerful industry veteran hiring the Best and the Brightest and the Most Expensive Experienced... You don't think that knowing what a virtual function is is part of the bare minimum of being a profesional C++ programmer? :rolleyes: :laugh: People who don't know that, or how source control works, or modular programming (never mind OO) have no business selling their services as a professional computer programmer. You wouldn't accept that level of competence in an accountant or surgeon or lawyer, yet these people are writing our financial systems, nuclear power plant monitoring systems, everything!
"Sucks less" isn't progress - Kent Beck [^] Awasu 1.1 [^]: A free RSS reader with support for Code Project.
Taka Muraoka wrote: ...how source control works... I'm not sure about source control. It is not something that you are learning in Uni or study course or whatever. I won't expect people to know. Maybe I just defending myself - when I came to my first job, I even didn't know that such thing exists at all :-O Philip Patrick Web-site: www.stpworks.com "Two beer or not two beer?" Shakesbeer
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I was going through the Joel-on-software thread as quickly as my extremely unhurried ISP speeds would allow me to, and I found that there is a good crowd here who intensely dislike being asked what they believe are stupid questions. I don’t think any of them has done an interview in South India (Madras, Trivandrum, Bangalore etc). For my previous company we had a requirement to take in 6 programmers and we put an Ad in the newspaper for the same. Within 2 weeks we got approximately 2500 resumes sent in to us through email/postal mail. This included freshers, people with experience and even people who were currently employed. The only solution to get to a smaller input chunk was to filter the trash out through a test paper (80% of which was prepared by me – the remaining 20% was Java). The portions I asked consisted of some rather basic to intermediate level questions on C++, the Win32 API, elementary programming aspects etc. and I also included a section that queried their English Language skills. I am of the opinion that any person who manages to become good enough in a foreign language (and English is foreign here) should have enough IQ to learn enough programming for most company requirements. Anyway from that list we still got over a 100 candidates, who we thought were quite okay or among whom we couldn’t make further ranking reasonably accurate. So we had to create two interview panels and do a first round interview and the two panels together came out with a list of 14 candidates who were quite good, and then we had to do a final interview to eventually select the final 6 (of which at least one, perhaps even two candidates had to be taken because of pressure from higher ups). As you can see, in situations like this, you have no choice but to try and filter out the good candidates by asking questions that might be categorized as silly, insulting. Saying that, it’s insulting to be asked what a virtual function is, is the same as an integer saying that he found it insulting when he had to allow himself to be divided by 2 to prove his even-hood ;-) When there are 3000 integers when we want just one, you really have to go through some filtering. Nish p.s. My bandwidth won't allow me to do a fair participation on pages beyond the first few on the Lounge, which is why I had to start a new thread.
"I'm a bit bored at the moment so I'm thinking about writing a new programming language" - Colin Davies My book :-
Not sure why you should be pissed off if you was asked such question. You don't know the company, they don't know you, so even if you are the champion of programmers, they simply don't know that! And usually people that get angry for such silly questions - they just don't know the answer ;P Philip Patrick Web-site: www.stpworks.com "Two beer or not two beer?" Shakesbeer
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I was going through the Joel-on-software thread as quickly as my extremely unhurried ISP speeds would allow me to, and I found that there is a good crowd here who intensely dislike being asked what they believe are stupid questions. I don’t think any of them has done an interview in South India (Madras, Trivandrum, Bangalore etc). For my previous company we had a requirement to take in 6 programmers and we put an Ad in the newspaper for the same. Within 2 weeks we got approximately 2500 resumes sent in to us through email/postal mail. This included freshers, people with experience and even people who were currently employed. The only solution to get to a smaller input chunk was to filter the trash out through a test paper (80% of which was prepared by me – the remaining 20% was Java). The portions I asked consisted of some rather basic to intermediate level questions on C++, the Win32 API, elementary programming aspects etc. and I also included a section that queried their English Language skills. I am of the opinion that any person who manages to become good enough in a foreign language (and English is foreign here) should have enough IQ to learn enough programming for most company requirements. Anyway from that list we still got over a 100 candidates, who we thought were quite okay or among whom we couldn’t make further ranking reasonably accurate. So we had to create two interview panels and do a first round interview and the two panels together came out with a list of 14 candidates who were quite good, and then we had to do a final interview to eventually select the final 6 (of which at least one, perhaps even two candidates had to be taken because of pressure from higher ups). As you can see, in situations like this, you have no choice but to try and filter out the good candidates by asking questions that might be categorized as silly, insulting. Saying that, it’s insulting to be asked what a virtual function is, is the same as an integer saying that he found it insulting when he had to allow himself to be divided by 2 to prove his even-hood ;-) When there are 3000 integers when we want just one, you really have to go through some filtering. Nish p.s. My bandwidth won't allow me to do a fair participation on pages beyond the first few on the Lounge, which is why I had to start a new thread.
"I'm a bit bored at the moment so I'm thinking about writing a new programming language" - Colin Davies My book :-
2500 test papers to mark? That must have been some task! Given that many to sift through I'd be sorely tempted by the David Brent approach which was quoted by someone here a while back: "Avoid employing unlucky people - throw half of the pile of CVs in the bin without reading them." :laugh: Debbie
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2500 test papers to mark? That must have been some task! Given that many to sift through I'd be sorely tempted by the David Brent approach which was quoted by someone here a while back: "Avoid employing unlucky people - throw half of the pile of CVs in the bin without reading them." :laugh: Debbie
Debs wrote: "Avoid employing unlucky people - throw half of the pile of CVs in the bin without reading them." LOL. :laugh:
Regards,Rohit Sinha
Do not wait for leaders; do it alone, person to person.
- Mother Teresa -
Taka Muraoka wrote: People who don't know that, or how source control works, or modular programming (never mind OO) have no business selling their services as a professional computer programmer bollocks. Most systems in use these days are written with C code. Only a few fraction projects use MFC, or any another virtual-hungry framework. Even with that in hand, the really purposed and proper use of virtual is ironical. Most often, in the code I see, virtual is put by default because either of these : - there was a virtual modifier in the header, and when someone had to add a new method, then he just replicated the pattern. - virtual is automatically used when you derive a method from a base class. Taking advantage of InternetExplorer to steal user's name and password. Taking advantage of InternetExplorer to steal user's clipboard.
Stephane Rodriguez. wrote: Most systems in use these days are written with C code. What I said: You don't think that knowing what a virtual function is is part of the bare minimum of being a professional C++ programmer It really doesn't make any difference whether the bulk of code in use to day is written in C or not. That doesn't change the fact that it is useful to *know* what a virtual function is and how they are properly used. I would have serious reservations about hiring somebody who hadn't bothered to keep their skills up, no matter how good they were, just the same as I would have reservations about going to a doctor who hadn't kept up with his profession and was still using techniques and knowledge from 20 years ago.
"Sucks less" isn't progress - Kent Beck [^] Awasu 1.1 [^]: A free RSS reader with support for Code Project.
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Shog9 wrote: i'd assumed all Indians were as smart as Smitha What was the provocation? :~ :laugh: Smitha You are never given a wish without also being given the power to make it true. You may have to work for it, however. -- Richard Bach
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Taka Muraoka wrote: ...how source control works... I'm not sure about source control. It is not something that you are learning in Uni or study course or whatever. I won't expect people to know. Maybe I just defending myself - when I came to my first job, I even didn't know that such thing exists at all :-O Philip Patrick Web-site: www.stpworks.com "Two beer or not two beer?" Shakesbeer
Philip Patrick wrote: when I came to my first job, I even didn't know that such thing exists at all Neither did I. This is my point: we emphasize the wrong things. We teach kids in school how to cut code but no-one gives a damn about code that works. And that's not just in school either. Not covering things like source control and regression testing is like teaching people how to construct buildings but not teach them how to put up scaffolding or other safety techniques because they'll "learn all that stuff on the job." :rolleyes:
"Sucks less" isn't progress - Kent Beck [^] Awasu 1.1 [^]: A free RSS reader with support for Code Project.
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I nearly used "...as smart as Nish", but was afraid it might give him a swollen head. :)
Shog9
Let your mercy spill / On all these burning hearts in hell If it be your will / To make us well...
When I once said "...as smart as Rohit" I got a swollen eye.
Regards,Rohit Sinha
Do not wait for leaders; do it alone, person to person.
- Mother Teresa -
When I once said "...as smart as Rohit" I got a swollen eye.
Regards,Rohit Sinha
Do not wait for leaders; do it alone, person to person.
- Mother Teresa -
Stephane Rodriguez. wrote: Most systems in use these days are written with C code. What I said: You don't think that knowing what a virtual function is is part of the bare minimum of being a professional C++ programmer It really doesn't make any difference whether the bulk of code in use to day is written in C or not. That doesn't change the fact that it is useful to *know* what a virtual function is and how they are properly used. I would have serious reservations about hiring somebody who hadn't bothered to keep their skills up, no matter how good they were, just the same as I would have reservations about going to a doctor who hadn't kept up with his profession and was still using techniques and knowledge from 20 years ago.
"Sucks less" isn't progress - Kent Beck [^] Awasu 1.1 [^]: A free RSS reader with support for Code Project.
1- it doesn't make sense for your employer to make you expert of newer technologies, when none of those technologies have any short term return value for the current project. I know it's sad, but with tight budgets, and employees willing to keep their job, I don't think you really choose. 2- be interested in new technologies doesn't make you de facto good at it. You may have heard a hundred times "virtual" on papers and websites, and could even give a good description of what it is, but the same guy could turn out to be unable to actually use virtual at places where it should have been good to use. 3- by the way, what makes the difference is not new technologies. What makes the difference is a sufficiently deep background to be able to handle whatever language or software plaform. And at this point, it is funny to talk about "virtual". After all, you could have a great academic background, have only used languages like Eiffel (which have the equivalent of virtal methods and classes), and you would treat the guy incompetent just because it doesn't know the "virtual" keyword. I don't buy this. 4- in fact, what makes the difference is how you deal with real world projects and issues, the way you oversee software programming, the way you discuss programming and tackle issues with your peers (savvy and non savvy people). My 2 cents. Taking advantage of InternetExplorer to steal user's name and password. Taking advantage of InternetExplorer to steal user's clipboard.
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I was going through the Joel-on-software thread as quickly as my extremely unhurried ISP speeds would allow me to, and I found that there is a good crowd here who intensely dislike being asked what they believe are stupid questions. I don’t think any of them has done an interview in South India (Madras, Trivandrum, Bangalore etc). For my previous company we had a requirement to take in 6 programmers and we put an Ad in the newspaper for the same. Within 2 weeks we got approximately 2500 resumes sent in to us through email/postal mail. This included freshers, people with experience and even people who were currently employed. The only solution to get to a smaller input chunk was to filter the trash out through a test paper (80% of which was prepared by me – the remaining 20% was Java). The portions I asked consisted of some rather basic to intermediate level questions on C++, the Win32 API, elementary programming aspects etc. and I also included a section that queried their English Language skills. I am of the opinion that any person who manages to become good enough in a foreign language (and English is foreign here) should have enough IQ to learn enough programming for most company requirements. Anyway from that list we still got over a 100 candidates, who we thought were quite okay or among whom we couldn’t make further ranking reasonably accurate. So we had to create two interview panels and do a first round interview and the two panels together came out with a list of 14 candidates who were quite good, and then we had to do a final interview to eventually select the final 6 (of which at least one, perhaps even two candidates had to be taken because of pressure from higher ups). As you can see, in situations like this, you have no choice but to try and filter out the good candidates by asking questions that might be categorized as silly, insulting. Saying that, it’s insulting to be asked what a virtual function is, is the same as an integer saying that he found it insulting when he had to allow himself to be divided by 2 to prove his even-hood ;-) When there are 3000 integers when we want just one, you really have to go through some filtering. Nish p.s. My bandwidth won't allow me to do a fair participation on pages beyond the first few on the Lounge, which is why I had to start a new thread.
"I'm a bit bored at the moment so I'm thinking about writing a new programming language" - Colin Davies My book :-
I think those questions are not silly at all. Check this out: http://www.newtechusa.com/ppi/main.asp You never know who you are dealing with, :-D