[ Sajith M ]

This is not strictly a follow-up to the other post I wrote - How to interview a developer. In my previous post I had written about the questions I usually ask candidates. In this I will describe what people have asked me (when I was being interviewed) that in my personal opinion are worthless questions and a complete waste of time.

• How would you solve this problem? [The problem statement here]
  Some people think this is a great way to understand the candidate’s problem solving capabilities. The problem with this approach is that unless you problem statement is well defined (and I have never seen it that way), there are literally hundreds of right answers (and these need not be the ones anticipated by the person conducting the interview)
• (take this paper) write some code to do [Some basic functionality]
  Since when did people start writing code on paper using pen. If you want to see if a candidate can write code or not, give him a laptop with the development environment and see if he can write code. People in real world write code using their favorite IDE that features auto-complete, syntax-highlighting, API help and everything else that people usually use. People in real world do not write code on paper using a pen, so please don’t test for it.

Am sure someone could justify both these practices. But to me they are a strict no…

Posted under: Technology/Software Development