> > >    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....

It might help if you clarify what you mean by a CGI script. Do you mean
any script that uses CGI.pm (or cgi-lib.pl)? Are there other modules/packages
you use specifically for CGI scripting in addition to that one? What other
criteria do you mean to imply? DBI? Apache::Session? HTML::Template? XYZ.pm?
CGI alone is too broad. Chances are your company doesn't make use of even a
10th of what Perl has to offer for CGI applications. Not to mention that one
can hardly be a Perl CGI developer without having a decent working knowledge
of "practical extraction and reporting language" in the more generalized
sense.

How about looking at your company's existing codebase and coming up with
general questions pertainant to it's functionality. For instance, say you
use CGI.pm extensively (which I assume is likely). Have a simple CGI.pm
problem prepared on paper before hand which the interviewee(s) are asked to
solve.

Or ask them to write a short CGI application to take a username from a form
input and display a greeting specific to the user via CGI.pm functions. This
should take no more than 5 minutes for most experienced CGI developers. On
the otherhand, if your company makes extensive use of some other
module/package, create one or more questions based on that instead. Or at
least ask the interviewee if s/he knows what it's for, how to find the
manual, etc.

Even for non-developers, there are a host of simple test questions that one
might come up with simply by buying an O'Reilly CGI cookbook or visiting
perldoc.com. In the end it's about ROI, so you have to ask what's going to
produce the best/desired result, and then do that thing with due focus.

Personally I love it when I get asked these sorts of questions in an
interview, because it vastly increases my confidence in the interviewer's
competence in addition to allowing me to prove my own. First impressions
count for alot, regardless of which side of the table you're facing.

--
=====================
 Shaun Fryer
=====================
 http://sourcery.ca/
=====================


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