

What interview questions would you ask a prospective Rails Developer? - myoung8

What kind of questions would you ask to test if the person has a nuanced understanding of the framework?
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Corrado
I generally find that asking specific questions about a technology or
technique is not really valuable. My preferred method of interviewing is to
sit down and talk with the candidate about "stuff", which should include said
technologies/techniques. After a fashion you will get a good understanding of
what they know about the subject; where they are strong and where they are
just blowing smoke. You'll also know more about how they would integrate into
your team.

So just relax and talk to the candidate and don't worry about asking the magic
questions that will answer all your prayers. :)

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swombat
Not only that, but a prospective rails developer should have at least a
handful of released projects/plugins, so the last thing you should be
_talking_ about is Rails.

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tyler
I tend to ask, not how you use the framework, but rather how the framework
works. How does routing actually work? How do named scopes work? How would you
implement the {before|after} filters on models... etc.

It's actually somewhat more difficult to tell whether someone knows how to use
Rails well. My only suggestion is to sit down in front of an editor with them
and work through actually building something small but meaningful.

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judofyr
If someone asks me how Rails works, I wouldn't be able to answer. It's just
something I don't care about. Sure, give me a few hours and I'll figure out
everything you asked for, but right off the bat? No way.

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tyler
In my opinion, that's a problem. If you don't understand what is actually
going on under the hood, you're likely to get bitten when things don't go
exactly as you expect.

ActiveRecord is the most obvious example of this. If you don't know what
queries it's going to throw out for a particular call, it may work just fine
in development but could easily bring down a site in seconds in production.

Routing is another example. If you have a particular action that needs to have
as low latency as possible changing its position in the routing file is often
one of the easiest and most effectual changes you can make. Someone who just
codes in the framework and doesn't understand how it works is unlikely to
realize that.

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jeromegn
I might ask the interviewee about stuff from the future of rails. If answered
correctly, it shows how someone can be in a continuous learning mode and eager
to go the extra mile.

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liangzan
I'd ask the candidate to pair program with a developer for a week. You'll know
immediately if the candidate can integrate with the team. Plus it'll reveal
his knowledge during the session.

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chris123
Could be wrong, but I think the question was "what interview questions?" The
interview is, for argument's sake, the second screen (the first one being the
review of the cover letter/email and resume/cv or whatever). The third screen
might be an audition or trial, such as you've described.

~~~
silentbicycle
Right. This is to filter out people before they waste whole days of your
teams' time.

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Zarathu
Ask them to develop something that involves caching the paginated search
results of a double-nested resource with file attachments in as little time as
possible. hehe

