

When hiring... - jmtame

When you're hiring, do you think a person would be qualified if they can answer most of your questions in pseudo code, or write out approximately what the code would look like on a white board?  Is this good enough for getting a hacker, or do you think people should be expected to write everything without any outside help?<p>Here's a sample question.. "what if you were asked to write two relational tables in a database and link B to the parent A"<p>Response given verbally "You would want to create a foreign key for table B, which would be equal to the primary key ID of table A..." and so on, they could explain the whole process, but they weren't able to write the exact SQL and PHP code from memory (or they described it from a different framework).  Is this typically ok?
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pjackson
The whiteboard and pseudocode questions work for me, but personally I like to
put a laptop in front of them with an IDE and a coding problem.

I allow outside help (google, etc) because in their work environment, they are
permitted to use any reference materials they want.

I also let them ask me questions.

Exact syntax, without the benefit of the compiler or IDE, is unimportant to
me. And, candidates that are on the spot to write code on a whiteboard are
usually more nervous when working in an unusual medium (who codes on a
whiteboard?)

So yes: in my opinion, they should write code in some fashion, and if that
medium doesn't include a syntax checker, the simple errors are OK.

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jmtame
That seems like a great approach, thanks for chiming in to help.

