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.

    In reply to Re: Perl Exam? by ptkdb
    in thread Perl Exam? by lnl

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