My favorite interview question is different but it has served me well over the years when hiring software devs:
Tell me about any software project that was 100% done by you (code, regression tests, docs, web site if there is one, mailing list if there is one, etc) that has been used by at least 10 people, none of whom contacted you for any help (thank you emails aren't help). The software doesn't have to be a big deal, years ago I wrote some regexp enabled wrappers for cp/mv such that you could do
move '*.c' '*.c++'
and posted it to usenet. Something like that counts.
What I'm trying to tease out is how much of the dev process can this person handle. And I'm trying to see if they tinker on their own. It's a bit of red flag for me if the person doesn't have any examples of this sort of thing.
That's a rather absurd set of constraints. Do you hire people to only work 100% alone on projects ? Would Linus Torvalds be a "red flag" because he's accepting contributions to Linux ?
Why 10 people ? There is no link between popularity and code quality. Presumably the developer won't be also in charge of marketing.
Did the piece of code you posted to usenet have tests, doc, a website and a mailing list ? How do you know that you had 10 users who never contacted you ?
In our industry programmers aren't allowed to be simply professionals. They are always expected to be "passionate" and if they don't program day and night and in their spare time then it is suspicious.
The point of the question is to find out what the candidate can do. If you interview a lot of people you will find that a lot of people claim they did more than they actually did.
As for 10 people, you typically get some sort of feedback when you put stuff out there.
What I was trying to say is "can you produce something that at least 10 people can install and use without having to ask you how does this work".
In my experience, the people that have put together some small open source (or not, I don't care about the license) project by themselves are in a somewhat different league. They can handle a broader set of problems, they don't depend on others to do the docs, tests, marketing, whatever. We're not talking about photoshop here, it could be some tool you wrote to do galleries of your photos.
A buddy of mine has a different way of asking a similar question: "If we needed you to, would you sweep the floors?"
We're both trying to get at the capabilities of the candidate.
I'm not asking you (or anyone) to program "day and night" but I do like it when people do it because they like it. I've done plenty of free stuff and I've found it rewarding.
By the same token the interviewee is trying to get a sense of your skills, with red flags of their own.
"*.c" is a glob, not a regexp. Quoting from Wikipedia:
> Globs do not include syntax for the Kleene star which allows multiple repetitions of the preceding part of the expression; thus they are not considered regular expressions, which can describe the full set of regular languages over any given finite alphabet
Tell me about any software project that was 100% done by you (code, regression tests, docs, web site if there is one, mailing list if there is one, etc) that has been used by at least 10 people, none of whom contacted you for any help (thank you emails aren't help). The software doesn't have to be a big deal, years ago I wrote some regexp enabled wrappers for cp/mv such that you could do
and posted it to usenet. Something like that counts.What I'm trying to tease out is how much of the dev process can this person handle. And I'm trying to see if they tinker on their own. It's a bit of red flag for me if the person doesn't have any examples of this sort of thing.