[..]
This has what to do with CGI?
Sorry forgot to toggle off the 'bitterness' flag, apparently I have been at this way to long.....
Wiggins, think about the idea for a moment, what if it were you first time in the barrel as the guy who had to do the interviewing of folks who were going to be writing perl code for some portion of the CGI project?
Couple of points that helped to create my bitterness,
1) hopefully if I were put in a position to actually interview, test so to speak, someone's aptitude in Perl or any technical skill, I would look to learn or expect to already know that skill, otherwise I have no way to judge what the interviewee provides as answers anyways. which leads to point 2....
2) as someone put in a position to handle hiring and being knowledgeable in a particular field, at least as well as need be for the position, I should be able to formulate my own questions that are pertinent to the situation.
I guess I have been to entirely too many interviews where the interviewee new next to nothing about anything, so much so that they couldn't tell if I was an idiot or an expert (I don't claim to know which I actually fall in if either, just know they can't tell either).
Where would you go to see if folks had a stock set of basic perl code questions that related to doing web-work.
Which brings me to my next point of bitterness....
3) If I wanted Perl questions (as the OP didn't specifically request CGI questions) then I would go to a different Perl list, if I wanted CGI questions I wouldn't ask for Perl ones. Now the bitterness, been to too many interviews and seen too many postings where Perl == CGI when they very much don't, despite what some well known and completely useless recruiting testers may suggest. I could be an ace Perl programmer and not know thing one about CGI, or I could be a great CGI programmer and not know 5% of what is available from Perl (trust me I was, well not sure about the "great" part, but sufficient).
My lead engineer sets them up with a basic walk through on basic so called 'simple perl questions' that are actually a part of a diabolical interegation method - since it starts out with
Right... but your lead engineer didn't have to ask experts what those questions were (see point 2).
what is CPAN?
A perfect example of a question that will likely find you Perl programmers as opposed to CGI scripters. Depending on what you want and how much you want to pay it may be overkill....
and based upon that he will roll into the questions about building perl modules for CPAN. Which normally fishes up things like have they or have they not worked with h2xs and/or XS code, hence can they do the bridge work to perl from pre-existing c-code libraries that would be required for doing some of the basic web-technology work.
Hmm not sure about that last bit, depends on how much C code you have around for doing web work. Personally outside of building XS modules others have provided on CPAN, I tend to avoid it like the plague. But then I would say I am pretty good at building CPAN modules and other softwares, but haven't written line one of XS...
That also gets us chances to talk about things like the t/ and 'make test' as a code coverage concern.
Boy it is really time I up and moved my *ss to a place where Perl is taken seriously...
At which point one knows a lot about what the person does with 'perl' as a 'coder' or as a 'scripter' and hence whether they will be useful at the design layer or merely at the typing layer.
True, but the ability to decipher that from the answers provided by a candidate depends, to me, on knowing how to generate those questions in the first place.
Toss in the usual questions about why would one use javascript, and how, vice perl on the server side. lace a few basic 'write me a perl code implementation of say the towers of hanoi problem or this or that, and one check for how they deal with an ambiguously worded coding problem - hence whether they should be looking before leaping - and then one catches their basic issues with actually doing perl code.
When can I interview... would certainly be a breathe of fresh air compared to the interviews I have been in. So you guys actually expect your candidates to have brains? what a novel concept, I will mention it to my boss ;-)....
Seriously, I understand there *might* be a place for this, just don't think it is on a CGI list, jobs-discuss, maybe, though they don't seem to enjoy these types of discussions either.
To anyone out there doing hiring, please think about what questions you are and aren't capable of asking.....
http://danconia.org
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