in reply to Perl Exam?

There are quite a few people with Perl on their resumes whose capablities don't extend much further than "Hello World"

Dead End Questions

If they can't answer any ONE of these, they're going to be more trouble than they're worth(YMMV).

  • what does "use strict ;" do?
  • how do you access a list?
  • how do you access a hash?
  • write a subroutine
  • write a loop
  • write an 'if' statement
  • how do you use a package? Example, I want to use the FileHandle package.

    More Lenient Questions

    These you can offer them a pass on, depending on how many they miss and your content and confident with them picking it up as they go along.
  • how do you debug a perl program? (Note, not required to use -d or other debugger, there are many people who get along just fine with injecting 'print' everywhere.)
  • How many Perl books do you own?
  • What's the difference between 'local' and 'my'?
  • Write a package and create an object with it.

  • access a list within a hash, within a list. Of course there are many many perl questions you can ask. What you have to set is the "Tipping Point" where this person knows enough to get by for the task at hand. There used to be something called "The Perl Purity Test," but that leaned towards saint level skills.

    One thing I've often HATED in interviews is that years and years after writing code in emacs, someone gives me some complex issue to solve in code and asks me to write on a white board.

    Not wishing to perpetuate such evil, my answer to that has been to write some 'busted' code on a white board sometime before the interview and then at some point ask the interviewee to look at it and tell me what's wrong.

    Take a laptop, with perl installed, and putting some pieces of simple and perhaps not so simple perl code on there, broken or not, and asking the interviewee to fix it or tell me what they think it's supposed to do; giving them time alone to do so.

    • Replies are listed 'Best First'.
    Re: Re: Perl Exam?
    by artist (Parson) on Oct 20, 2003 at 16:57 UTC
      A little concern.

      Would you consider it mandatory to have explaination for the items that you use to be a good programmer for 'this' need? For example what if the candidate doesn't know exactly what is the purpose of 'use strict' but always uses it in the program to avoid any messages.

      Would you hire a programmer 1. having good practices ie.. using knowledge for programming advantage, or 2. expert in theory to which programmer may not be capable of converting it into practice.

      In my opinion many of the 'know how' is not readily transferable to information. But for human being it can be easily seen by someone having similar or better knowledge.

      artist
      ===================================================
      Perl is fast.. So I spend more time doing fast things
    		[reply]
    Re: Re: Perl Exam?
    by Juerd (Abbot) on Oct 21, 2003 at 07:18 UTC

      How many Perl books do you own?

      Does this really matter? I own no Perl book, but I'm not Perl-ignorant.

      There is a lot of free on-line Perl documentation, and it is more than enough to become a good Perl coder. If owning a book means anything, then IMHO, it means that you don't like screen reading. And that's not positive: you better get used to reading the stuff on the screen, because that is where your code is going to be.

      Juerd # { site => 'juerd.nl', plp_site => 'plp.juerd.nl', do_not_use => 'spamtrap' }

    		[reply]
        How many Perl books do you own?

        Does this really matter? I own no Perl book, but I'm not Perl-ignorant.

        Ignoring the issue of hardcopy versus onscreen(for now), I would ask this question as an indicator of professional commitment. However, in retrospect, I might not ask it on the hypothetical test because it's far too easy to lie about it, and judges historically have turned me down for the search warrant.

    		[reply]
          I would ask this question as an indicator of professional commitment.

          It can also be an indicator of people just not getting it. I've lost track of the number people I've come across who keep buying Perl books in the hope that one would make sense to them.

    		[reply]
    Re: Re: Perl Exam?
    by lnl (Pilgrim) on Oct 20, 2003 at 16:48 UTC

      ptkdb-

      Yes, this is like what I had in mind. But I want to make it a written, multiple choice exam, so I don't have to sit there asking the questions or reading code.

      I'd rather assess other issues than technical ones when we are face-to-face.

      --lnl

    		[reply]
        It's certainly possible to write such an exam, perhaps even put it into some HTML or even CGI format to check results and mail them somewhere, or just something that prints out well.

        If such a thing already exists on line, such as 'brainbench.com' it's probably going to cost some money to take it. Who's going pay?

        Any of the monks here could probably write a half decent test in probably under an hour, and then spend the next two weeks debating the merits of various questions.

    		[reply]

    In Section Meditations